Re: Named argument view for IDE and more

From: Chris Sonnack (Chris_at_Sonnack.com)
Date: 04/26/04 

Date: Mon, 26 Apr 2004 10:39:09 -0500

Booted Cat wrote:

> As you may have guessed, I think it possible to make this a feature
> of the IDE.

I'm opposed to situations where I *need* the IDE, because it's a
common practice for me that I drop out of the IDE and use some other
editor. I also don't like IDEs that add stuff to the source or which
require special comments in the source.

That means your system would need a *separate* database or file,
and that often leads to synchronization problems or restrictions
in how one may edit the source.

> A first thought was to keep the argument order as specified by the
> function declaration, but allow the editing and viewing of function
> arguments in a named manner. That is to say, the argument list is
> displayed as a closeable table immediately after every function call.

My IDEs already do something very close to this.

I'm not a fan of extra "tables" I need to fill in. It's usually
a lot easier just to do the typing on one line.

I suppose it might be a nice thing for beginners, but I'm going to
guess that most working programmers would find it more irritating
and intrusive than helpful. (But maybe I'm just an old fart. :-)

> We know modern programming language design is evolving toward a
> goal of "programming like speaking a natural language";..

DO we know this? I don't, and I'm not sure it's a useful idea.
Natural language is notoriously imprecise and ambiguous. Most
attempts at this have struck me as horribly unwieldy to use.

> [snip]
>
> We would be able to call it in these ways:
>
> memcpy(to p2; from p1; amount count); // the original order
> memcpy(amount count; from p1; to p2); // the english order
> (from p1; memcpy amout count; to p2); // the chinese order

Programmers are known for being lazy, and I imagine I speak for
many when I say that the overwhelming preference would be for:

        memcpy(p1, p2, count); 

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