language function args

More stream of consciousness....

One of my favorite poster children of screwed up function calls is the FOX toolkit.

Here's an example taken straight from wikipedia:

FXMainWindow *main=new FXMainWindow(&application, "Hello", NULL, NULL, DECOR_ALL);

As you can tell the argument list is highly self documenting. NULL, NULL is very meaningful.

Sadly I've been driven to write something like this before.

Just a thought for some other type syntax


FXMainWindow * const main
(new FXMainWindow with
application=&application
, name="Hello"
, icon=NULL
, miniicon=NULL
, opts=DECOR_ALL);


What's interesting is that naming the fucntion args allows arbitrary ordering of args and arbitrary default argument implementation in the function.