Newsgroups: comp.lang.dylan
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From: davis@ilog.fr (Harley Davis)
Subject: Re: Argument ordering conventions?
In-Reply-To: Patrick C. Beard's message of 9 Jul 1995 21:47:12 GMT
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	<3tpga5$upa@acs6.acs.ucalgary.ca> <3tpip0$rak@bdt.bdt.com>
Date: 12 Jul 1995 09:03:20 GMT


In article <3tpip0$rak@bdt.bdt.com> Patrick C. Beard <beard@cs.ucdavis.edu> writes:

   In article <3tno1n$10or@acs6.acs.ucalgary.ca> Matthew Alan Chaput,
   machaput@acs.ucalgary.ca writes:
   >Of course the BEST way to avoid ALL ordering problems is KEYWORD 
   >arguments. I'm sorry that I wasn't paying great attention when this was 
   >discussed, but are keywords absolutely not in Dylan?

   Keywords are most definitely part of Dylan. Here's how you declare them:

   define generic make-range (#key from:, to:) => (result :: <range>);

   Here's how you specify them:

   make-range(from: 1, to: 10);

   However, I don't believe keyword arguments are used in method
   dispatching, but rather as a way to "extend" a protocol with
   additional arguments without changing the basic generic function
   signature.

By the way, has there been any work in implementations to statically
resolve keywords in function calls?  If keywords are optional and
unordered, it must be pretty inefficient to treat them completely at
runtime.  Is there a way to put keyword information in module
interfaces for compile-time resolution?

-- Harley Davis
-- 

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