Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!iuvax!cica!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!pt.cs.cmu.edu!MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU!lindsay From: lindsay@MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++ Subject: Re: Default argument values Message-ID: <5661@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 26 Jul 89 18:59:05 GMT References: <43253@bbn.COM> <20077@paris.ics.uci.edu> Distribution: comp Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI Lines: 17 In article <20077@paris.ics.uci.edu> schmidt@glacier.ics.uci.edu (Doug Schmidt) writes: >IMHO, named parameters are another Ada (mis)feature that adds >gratuitous complexity to the compiler and programmer without providing >much value-added benefit. Well, yes. They allowed the intermixture of positional and named arguments, this making it potentially hard to understand the positional material. If you really need named arguments, you can have them now, even in C and Pascal. Pass a data structure, and precede the call with assignments to named fields. It doesn't allow a simple defaulting scheme, but there are a variety of less-simple schemes that can be pressed into service. And, it has wins of its own, such as using const structures, or ones that don't vary around a loop. -- Don D.C.Lindsay Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science