Kind people,
I've brought this up before, and with Dennis BjÅrklund's help, would
like to bring it up again. Here's the idea:
I'd like to be able to create functions with named parameters that
could be called with the names in any order. For example,
CREATE OR REPLACE FUNCTION foo_func(name TEXT, val INTEGER) AS ...
SELECT foo_func(val AS 23, name AS 'Name goes here');
and have it Do The Right Thing.
Dennis has pointed out that mixing the call-with-named-parameter
interface with call-by-order-of-parameters one would cause confusion,
and I think it would be OK to disallow this type mixing, so
SELECT foo_func(name AS 'yet another name', 35);
would be disallowed.
A calling convention that names parameters makes it a lot easier to
track just exactly what parameter is set to which value, and lets
people not have to memorize what order those named parameters appear
in. On a related note, it would also be nice to have default
parameters and some way to say to use them.
Well, that's my thoughts so far. What are yours?
Cheers,
D
--
David Fetter david@fetter.org http://fetter.org/
phone: +1 510 893 6100 mobile: +1 415 235 3778
Remember to vote!
