Named parameters with type overloads

[Benny]

@govorunov

Sorry for digging this up

Start a new topic instead next time. Link and quote the comments in an inactive thread you’re replying to. It is more polite to the previous participants and saves the admins the trouble of splitting the topic for you.

@govorunov

When calling a method there is an option to supply some or all positional arguments by names.

@govorunov

Mos other languages have ‘passing arguments by name’ feature. See no point why Julia can’t. Probably the very reason why Julia struggles to gain traction even though it is such an elegant language. Being proud and unique doesn’t really work that well

Most other languages don’t have multimethods, and that’s the exact reason why methods are dispatched on positional arguments. Trying to mix it up makes multimethods an unfeasible nightmare to write, so it’s only a feasible feature for single-method functions.

@govorunov

But again, with the proposed design I see not a single breaking change.

@govorunov

When calling a method require the use of semicolon ‘;’ IF a method call references positional arguments by their names.

You’d change this behavior:

julia> foo(a, b) = 1
foo (generic function with 1 method)

julia> foo(;a, b) = 2
foo (generic function with 2 methods)

julia> foo(b = 1, a = 1;)
2