Re: RFC 57 (v1) Subroutine prototypes and parameters

On Tue, Aug 08, 2000 at 10:14:53AM -0700, Nathan Wiger wrote:
> > Er, I thought we were talking about setting named parameters, not
> > default values.
> > 
> >         sub foo ($name = 'Fred', $age = 32) {   # defaults
> >             # do stuff with $name and $age
> >         }
> >
> >         foo('Barney', 31);              # Positional assignment
> >         foo($age:31, $name:'Betty');    # Named assignment
> >         foo($age:=31, $name:='Betty');  # Named assignment v2
> 
> Wow, I was actually looking at this backwards. Let me brain dump:
> 
>    # Defaults
>    sub foo ($name ||= 'Fred', $age ||= 32) { ... }

Okay, why "||=" there rather than just "="?  AFAIK, "sub foo ($a = 1)
{ ... }" doesn't do anything useful in perl now, so we can do with it
what we will in relative impunity.

>    foo($age = 31, $name = 'Betty'); # Named assignment

But that already has a meaning that I'd hesitate to take away from the
programmer.

-Scott
-- 
Jonathan Scott Duff
[email protected]