Re: Keyword arguments...

Subject: Re: Keyword arguments...
From: Paul Prescod <papresco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 6 Aug 1998 11:58:50 -0400 (EDT)
On Thu, 6 Aug 1998, Norman Walsh wrote:

> Is it the case, as it appears to be, that in user-defined
> functions with keyword arguments, the keyword arguments must
> always appear last?

Close but not quite.

> Is that the case, or am I overlooking something?

I addressed this issue in my SGML/XML 97 talk, "Strategies for DSSSL Code 
Reuse:"

"It was harder than we expected to emulate the procedure call behaviour 
of make expressions. DSSSL make expressions take a sequence of keyword 
arguments that specify the characteristics of the flow object followed by 
an optional sequence of sosofo-arguments that specify the content. There 
is no way in DSSSL to specify that the arguments to a procedure should be 
a series of keyword arguments followed by a list of the rest of the 
arguments. Instead you must accept all arguments as a list and separate 
the keywords from their arguments and the keyword argument pairs from the 
rest of the arguments using list processing code. This slows things down 
and makes the code more complicated. We propose that DSSSL support this 
natively in future versions. The formal argument list for a procedure 
should be allowed to specify that a variable number of #!rest arguments 
can come after the declared keyword arguments."

I don't have the code I used to implement this at work. I can send it to 
you tomorrow, if that will help.

 Paul Prescod


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  • Keyword arguments...
    • Norman Walsh - from mail1.ability.netby web4-1.ability.net (8.8.5/8.6.12) with ESMTP id KAA18411Thu, 6 Aug 1998 10:45:24 -0400 (EDT)
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