Named parameters implementation in harbour?

[Roberto Parisi]

Hi all,

I think Harbour would make a big step forward if it adds support for named parameters.
Do you think it would be possible to implement them with Harbour's current structure?  

Regards

[alkresin]

Roberto,

  theoretically, this could be possible, but for those functions only, which are defined in the same source file, where their calls are - because Harbour compiler knows nothing about parameter names. This limitation makes the feature meaningless.

But, fortunately, we have a preprocessor). Below is  a small sample:

#xtranslate dbUseArea( [new=<nw>[,]] [file=<(db)>[,]] [exclusive=<ex>[,]] ) => dbUseArea( <nw>,,<(db)>,, <ex>,, )

dbUseArea( file=aaa.dbf )
dbUseArea( file=aaa.dbf, exclusive=.t. )
dbUseArea( exclusive=.f., new=.t. )

You can create an include file with rules for all functions you need. This doesn't allow to use positional and named parameters together, though.

Regards, Alexander.

суббота, 15 марта 2025 г. в 09:25:45 UTC+3, Roberto Parisi:

[Roberto Parisi]

Thanks, nice solution, but I was thinking about a "native" solution.
My dream is one day having harbour like python, ease of coding is almost there, we just need to leave behing some legacy stuff. 
Would be great a new harbour fork breaking old style clipper stuff and focusing on modern languages features.

Regards.

[Eric Lendvai]

I completely agree with Roberto, many mother languages have that support, for example: Python, Ruby, C#, Objective-C, Swift, Kotlin

Why Use Named Parameters?

• Improves readability: Easier to understand function calls.

• Avoids parameter order dependency: Useful when functions have many parameters.

• Enhances code maintainability: Adding default values is easier.

[Gerald Drouillard]

I use a couple different ways for programs or functions with many parameters.

1. Pass the parameters as a hash.
2. pass the parameters as a string eg myfunc("file=aaa.dbf", "exclusive=.t.").  Works the same as the command line when starting a program.

function myfunc( ... )

private file,exclusive

default_parameters(hb_AParams(),.t.)

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