[fpc-pascal] Named optional arguments

Ryan Joseph genericptr at gmail.com
Wed Dec 1 13:05:25 CET 2021



> On Dec 1, 2021, at 4:56 AM, Sven Barth <pascaldragon at googlemail.com> wrote:
> 
> If you don't allow to skip parameters then this feature can be considered absolutely useless. Who would voluntarily write more when many users already cry about Pascal being so verbose?

I thought the option of improved readability made sense for a language like Pascal.

> 
>> Yes I understand that the overloading happens after parsing. In your first example if arbitrary order was allowed new overloading rules would need to be applied so that you got an ambiguous function error. Not a big deal to resolve that I would think but it doesn't have to go in that direction either.
>> 
>> Personally I'm not in favor or changing the overloading rules, just that some calls were easier to read by glancing over them. In fact I have seen IDEs which have a feature which inserts the param name into the editor for this very reason.
> 
> You still don't get it. This is not about "changing the overloading rules" but about this feature fitting into the existing overload selection functionality.

No I really do understand what the situation is if you can believe me. I don't see this is a big problem or too complicated to tackle but if you really dislike the idea so much then we'll leave it at that. There's more important potential features to work on anyways. 

btw kind of off topic did you like my idea of default properties for records so we can implement smart pointers? I got a good chunk of that done months ago but never heard anything about it...

Regards,
	Ryan Joseph



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