>> >> At any point in this discussion has anyone explained why these >> labels would >> actually be a good idea? >> > > it's allows smart libraries like SQL/XML
You could always just pass the label as an additional parameter. Which is all this would be syntactic sugar for anyways. So it doesn't "allow" such libraries it just let users type foo(bar=>'baz') instead of foo('bar','baz'). Not much gain for all this pain.