To Adopt mandatory semicolon in method calls if kwargs are passed

[josePereiro]

Thanks for the quick reply!

@yuyichao

and the fact that argument name is not a property of a function but that of a method.

Upps, my mistake!

@yuyichao

there isn’t any way sensible to interpret a named positional argument.

I see that this is a controversial topic, that’s why discution in posted link exist.

@yuyichao

Nope, it helps nothing there either. new is defined clear enough that it doesn’t need help to distinguish between positional and keyword arguement.

Yes, but I found

@Benjia

I find that aligning the arguments to new() with the order of the struct fields to be quite tedious and error prone (especially if adjacent fields have the same type, or I add / reorder types).

To have named arguments can help there too.

@yuyichao

Nope, the only issue there is dispatch

Yes, but I think a solution that do not change how dispatch works and add the features people already like from other languages can be found. What is proposed do not touch dispatch, I think?

I found in that discussion, as an example:

@StefanKarpinski

The trouble with this is that you need to know which arguments passed with key = val syntax are positional and which are keyword arguments before you can choose a method. But you don’t know that until you’ve selected a method. For example, if I see f(x = 1, y = 2, z = 3) how do I know which subset of x , y and z are positional and should be used to dispatch f and which are keywords and should be ignored during dispatch? There are 8 = 2^3 possibilities to consider and that number grows exponentially with the number of arguments.

As the proposal say f(x = 1, y = 2, z = 3) will be interpreted as current call f(1, 2, 3) and the ambiguity is gone, just because semicolon is mandatory. To be able to optionally label positional arguments is not like REALLY important, but it is cool.

@yuyichao

If you have a plan to change that, which should be discussed in Allow use of named-argument syntax for positional arguments? instead

That’s ok, I just wanted to focus on the idea of make semicolon mandatory because help to solve other problems/issues