Re: named arguments

[Jordi Gutiérrez Hermoso]

2012/3/16 John W. Eaton <address@hidden>:
> 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.

Really? How? Without futzing around with varargin and testing for
string equality?

- Jordi G. H.