Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!csd4.milw.wisc.edu!bionet!ames!pacbell!varian!kinetics!minshall
From: minshall@kinetics.UUCP (Greg Minshall)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++
Subject: Re: Default argument values
Message-ID: <790@kinetics.UUCP>
Date: 2 Aug 89 05:04:23 GMT
References: <5661@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Distribution: comp
Organization: Kinetics, Inc., Walnut Creek, CA
Lines: 16

I assume that various participants in this newsgroup had occasion in years
past to use the IBM 370 assembler macro facility.  How much this discussion
of named parameters (and even default parameter values in C++) remind/amuses
me of the above assembler.

The macro facility allowed both "positional" and "keyword" parameters.
Positional parameters needed to come first in the parameter list; any
or all could be left out (an intervening positionaly parameter could
be excluded by use of the "comma" operator: foo a,b,,d).  Keyword parameters
could be specified (in the call) in any order; they could be defined by
the macro to have default values.

It was quite an assembler.

Greg Minshall			Kinetics/Excelan/Novell
minshall@kinetics.com		1-415-947-0998