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Reverse argument order

David Brady daves_spam_dodging_account at yahoo.com
Fri Oct 19 17:59:19 EDT 2001 
Thanks, everyone, for your answers.  Also, thanks to
those of you that ways of asking if the question
really needed to be asked.

At the time I had posted, we had considered all of the
non-answer answers that were posted here.  Most were
rejected by the business half of the team, because
they have a goal of reducing the keystroke count as
much as possible.  They're already upset that the new
scripting language has to have parentheses everywhere.
 :-)

Specifically,

We considered using named arguments, but rejected them
because even typing Wait(m=3,s=10) was judged to be
too hard, let alone Wait(minutes=3, seconds=10). 
Personally, I like this approach best, and I want to
just write in the manual, "Look, you're going to have
to learn to type, okay?"  But that's just me.

We also considered using Wait(0,0,5) for a 5-second
wait, but this was also shot down.

One possible compromise was offered by the business
half of the team, that they would be willing to type
Wait(,,5), but *WE* shot that down on the grounds that
it does not work.  (They were thinking it would
evaluate to Wait(None,None,5) which could then have
been turned into 0,0,5).

We considered the string bit, but strings require
quotes....

We even considered modifying the Python source so that
it would accept 00:00:00 as a token identifying a time
type (that we would add).  This was discarded by
everyone as WAY too much effort.  (Imagine getting the
lexer to accept things like "while t < 1:05: pass")

Anyway, thank you all again for your answers and help.
 This project is starting to shape up!

-dB
P.S. We're going to go with the "while len(args)<3:
args.insert(0,0)" model for now.  Much less sucky,
yes, thanks!

=====
--
David Brady
daves_spam_dodging_account at yahoo.com
I'm feeling very surreal today... or *AM* I?

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