andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Nicolas Alvarez wrote:
> >
> > Well, most languages don't have named parameters.
> Matlab has untyped variable length arguments. I use that often to have
> name-value pairs. It does, however, depend on having an eval facility.
> (even an evalin('caller'...) ) That might make the whole process a bit
> slow. So it might not be the best solution here.

Java provides many of the data stuctures one ever needs. One of them is a
key-value structure (java.util.Dictionnary and its derived classes
Hashtable and hashmap). It could help implementing many syntactic
convienence features, such as name-value pairs and named parameters. But it
also has Collections, Vector (not the same meaning as POV,) LinkedList (with
the derived ArrayList), StringTokenizer, Arrays, etc ...

Concerning typing, my feeling is that we should have loose typing, implicit
typing, explicit typing when needed. Polymorphism is quite confusing and
dangerous if you are not an experienced programmer. A single variable
should only one run-time type.


Bruno

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