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Date: Wed, 30 Nov 2005 15:16:43 -0800
To: Andrei Zmievski <andrei@gravitonic.com>
Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Named arguments revisited
From: jared@intuitivefuture.com (Jared White)

On Nov 30, 2005, at 1:50 PM, Andrei Zmievski wrote:
> Can you explain your reasoning behind "essential for using PHP as a  
> solid templating language" and "nothing is a good substitute for  
> the real deal"?
>
> - Andrei

OK, to take an example from Smarty, you could do a value cycle (for  
multi-row-color tables, etc.) with some extra parameters like so:

{cycle name="myCycle" values="#eeeeee;#d0d0d0"  print=false  
reset=true delimiter=";"}

(I'm not a Smarty expert, so I apologize if I didn't get that quite  
right.)

Now, if I wanted to express that with a PHP function currently, it  
might look like this:

cycle("myCycle", "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0", false, true, ";");

My question is, what if you have no idea how the cycle function  
works, or you haven't used it in a while and temporarily forgot? Your  
two options are look at the source code (if possible) or look at the  
documentation (if it's any good). Whereas with named arguments, it's  
self-explanatory.

cycle(name: "myCycle", values: "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0", print: false,  
reset: true, delimiter: ";");

(FYI: I just picked a colon for the heck of it...whatever operator is  
used isn't important to me.)

Much, much clearer and obvious. Perhaps not such a big deal in  
"regular" PHP code blocks, but in an HTML/PHP mixed template type of  
scenario, the named arguments are so much nicer. Plus, if they're  
implemented in an order-agnostic fashion, you could reorder those  
arguments any way you like -- but I don't necessarily think that's  
its biggest selling point.

Sure, you could use an array for this, like so:

cycle(array("name" => "myCycle", "values" => "#eeeeee;#d0d0d0",  
"print" => false, "reset" => true", "delimiter" => ";"));

But not only is that a lot more verbose and messy, but it provides no  
language features in the function/method definition itself, so you  
just have to hope the big array that comes in has the right stuff in  
it. Not ideal.

Anyway, I hope that helps, and if you have any other thoughts or  
questions, please shoot away.

Regards,

Jared