On Sun, 13 Mar 2005 10:14:49 -0500, Evan Prodromou <evan(a)bad.dynu.ca> wrote:
I also don't think that named-arg passing makes
defining the event
parameters any simpler; you just have to look up the names of the
parameters rather than their position. Either way, there's a
documentation requirement that won't go away.
This is just a comment, in that you've done the hard work of coding
the thing, so far be it from me to criticise from such limited
experience, but I think there are advantages to named arguments:
* it makes *altering* the event parameters in the future easier to
cope with - if you have named parameters they can always remain as
meaning the same thing; if an extra one is added, it gets an extra
name; if one is lost, functions which didn't use it anyway will still
work. With un-named params, you might be able to get away with adding
an extra one on the end, but you certainly couldn't safely remove one,
and adding one in the middle because it was a more logical ordering
would also be a no-no.
* if a function only needs to refer to one of the params, it's kind of
annoying to define it as something like myFunction($ignore1, $ignore2,
$ignore3, [etc,] $the_arg_we_want). Kind of a minor point, but
definitely more convenient with named args, where you'd just never
mention the others, even though they'd been passed.
* Similarly, people might mistakenly think that the name of the
arguments is important, or even find themselves with garbled results
because they thought the name of the arguments was *sufficient*. But I
guess people *that* new to programming are going to have multiple
problems anyway, and will need someone to call on for advice who'd see
through that.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]