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Date: Fri, 13 Jan 2006 09:08:14 +0100
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To: Andi Gutmans <andi@zend.com>
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] Re: Named arguments revisited
From: lsmith@php.net (Lukas Smith)

Andi Gutmans wrote:
> In my opinion, as Ilia stated passing an associative array does the job 
> quite well for the use-case where named arguments would be useful.
> Sure it might be a tad-bit sexier that you don't have to write array() 
> but the truth is that the implementation would probably still use an 
> array. Unlike Ada which has extremely strict typing, in PHP in most 
> cases we wouldn't be able to optimize away the named parameters, meaning 
> that we'd probably do the array() trick anyway.

You are argueing from a php internal level. Named parameters are useful 
for situations where you have alot of parameters. I think people have 
shown that this may not be the common case, but its still very much real.

People have shown ways to handle default values fairly efficiently. 
However this still dances around the language level documentation.

It also dances around the need for error handling entirely. Of course 
you could also hack in some checks using array_diff() to determine if 
there are any unwanted parameters and then trigger an error.

Now we have not even addressed the potential for type hinted parameters.

However this means adding a fair amount of LOC, that are much less 
obvious to read. Performance in this case is not the main factor, but if 
oyu add in a call to array_diff() with a !empty() if statement I think 
its hard to argue that the performance would be equal either.

Also contrary to alot of the things we have added since php 5.x I think 
this language feature would be much more obvious and easy to grasp even 
without reading any documentation on it. As such it very much fits the 
PHP style and has very little risk of obfuscating the language.

Now obviously there would have to be someone to implement it, but I see 
no "design" reason to not allow this feature in.

regards,
Lukas