Re: named arguments

[John W. Eaton]

On 16-Mar-2012, fork wrote:

| Also, it is one thing to hit ML compatibility with current syntax, but with
| trying to second guess syntax that *might change* is silly, unless there is a
| document or something telling us to expect the change.

It's not silly.  Changes in Matlab have prompted us to make changes to
Octave.  Examples are variable number of arguments, the way structures
work, C-style I/O functions, and probably others that I've forgotten
about now.  Even if TMW just implements a different way of handling
named arguments that is not directly in conflict with what we do, we
end up having to support two different ways of doing the same thing or
force our users to change their code so we can only support the Matlab
way of handling the feature.

| This would be a big change and we should worry over it pretty hard and keep it
| optional, but I think it would be a GREAT addition to the language if we could
| do it right.

Optional makes no sense.  Now you are requiring someone to have a
version of Octave compiled or run with the right switches in order to
run your code?

jwe