Invisible wrote:
> Don't forget Smalltalk. (Although Smalltalk still requires you to write 
> them *in the right order*.)

*And* it doesn't tell you in advance when you get it wrong. :-)

Try Ada. :-)

> Yeah, actually _any_ function that requires 8 distinct arguments is 
> probably a bad idea. 

For OO, you should probably be setting them as configuration-style data on 
the object you're invoking. This is Bertrand Meyer's take on it, and it 
makes sense to me: if you have a method in an OO language that has optional 
arguments, those arguments ought to be properties on the object with setters 
and getters. I think this is probably true, because 95% of the time I wind 
up with optional arguments, it's because I already wrote and used the 
function in a bunch of places, and now I want to pass one more argument 
without tracking down all the places the original got called. Either making 
it a method with a settable parameter in the instance, or actually taking 
the time to track down all the calls (which can be messy in a very dynamic 
language) would fix that.

For functional, I can easily imagine a main loop sort of thing having to 
carry around a bunch of arguments that don't make sense to put together.

For example, I have a computer word game where the main game-engine keeps a 
list of possible guesses, a list of the computer's past guesses, a list of 
new words it learned this game, a list of guesses made by the player and 
their associated score, the human's previous guess, the computer's previous 
guess, the computer's secret work (which the human is trying to guess), the 
original list of words, the connection to the UI, and the random number 
seed. It's hard to believe there's any data structure that sensibly 
encapsulates all that without simply being a kludge to work around the lack 
of loops in the language. (With loops, you'd just make most of them local 
variables and not actually have to pass them through the recursive calls.) 
Mind, I'm not used to functional programming, so maybe I'm doing something 
wrong...

-- 
   Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   The NFL should go international. I'd pay to
   see the Detroit Lions vs the Roman Catholics.

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