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Date: Wed, 18 Apr 2012 01:23:17 +0200
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] [RFC] skipping optional parameters
From: j.boggiano@seld.be (Jordi Boggiano)

On 18.04.2012 00:54, Stas Malyshev wrote:
> One of the annoying things I've encountered in working with PHP was
> dealing with functions having long optional parameter lists, especially
> if you need to change only the last one - you have to copy all the
> defaults. Full named params implementation would solve it, probably, but
> before we have that here's an easier solution for part of the problem:
> 
> https://wiki.php.net/rfc/skipparams
> 
> Basically, it allows you to do this:
> 
> create_query("deleted=0", "name",,, /*report_errors*/ true);

Pretty cool especially since it avoids the problem when refactoring code
of knowing whether the use of the default param was intentional or just
as a filler to reach a later parameter.

I do have two remarks though:

- I hope it doesn't mean giving up on named args, because that would
look way cleaner.

- Would it be possible to allow trailing commas in combination to this?
i.e. foo("arg",) would just call foo with "arg" and then the default
value for the second arg if there is one, or just nothing. That would
make multi-line function calls a bit cleaner, and more similar to arrays.

Cheers

-- 
Jordi Boggiano
@seldaek - http://nelm.io/jordi