Re: named arguments

[John W. Eaton]

On 16-Mar-2012, Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso wrote:

| 2012/3/16 Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso <address@hidden>:
| > On 16 March 2012 07:53, Olaf Till <address@hidden> wrote:
| >> I'm not aware of Octave supporting named arguments. There was once a
| >> suggestion to support named arguments, but it has been disapproved
| >> because of the risk of future incompatibilities with Matlab.
| >
| > I wish we could fix this. Named arguments are a huge convenience. Can
| > you think of something better than this?
| >
| >    http://abandonmatlab.wordpress.com/2009/07/31/no-named-arguments/
| 
| Oh, and here is my idea:
| 
| Introduce some sort of syntax in function declarations (maybe
| something like Python's traditional **kwarg?) that will give you a
| struct with the named arguments, so perhaps something like
| 
|     function out = foo(bar, baz, **kwarg)
|         ## ...
|     endfunction
| 
| Now if you call the function like this:
| 
|     foo(1,2 "oh", 2, "hai", rand(3), "there", "lol");

You can already do keyword-value pairs, so I don't see the point of
introducing new syntax in the function declaration.

jwe