Jim Fuller>I think in any programming language, its kind of a 'bad
smell' when a function has a very long signature ... are you sure all
these options are intrinsic to your function
I think there's a difference between "having lots of options" and
"having a very long signature". In languages where functions always have
positional arguments, the challenge is to define a function signature
that accepts lots of options without requiring lots of positional
arguments, and that's what we are discussing here. Using a map argument
is essentially a workaround for the fact that the language does not
offer named parameters on calls.
I can think of plenty of cases where having lots of options is perfectly
respectable. For example I can think of at least a dozen options one
might want to specify to the deep-equal() function. It's only because
XQuery doesn't provide a convenient way of providing such options that
they aren't actually available.
(The regular expression functions, incidentally, provide options through
the flags argument as a set of boolean options each represented by one
letter in a string: it's a crude mechanism, but it works.)
Michael Kay
Saxonica
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