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Comment by taspeotis | Hacker News Reader

> and don't get me started on Objective-C..

    itsNotTheLanguagesFaultPerSe:butIfTheFunctions:andTheirParameters:werentNamedLikeThis:itWouldBeBearable

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I find the descriptive nature of method signatures to be quite delightful. Unlike other languages like C++, I don't always have to go looking for the function definition to see the types of the parameters it takes, and what exactly was the order again? Combined with Xcode's autocomplete, it saves a lot of time.

I shed a small tear every time I have to call a C API with and endless parade of (NULL, NULL, 0, NULL).

In C99 it's possible to use compound literals to implement something like named parameters. You create a struct with all of your parameters, and only include the ones you want to set in the compound literal. Anything not explicitly specified in the compound literal gets set to 0, so the caveat is that 0 can't be a valid value for your parameters.

The book 21st century C talks about that trick:

http://books.google.fr/books?id=_EdbrocXX9MC&lpg=PA183&ots=D...

Switch .fr to .com: http://books.google.com/books?id=_EdbrocXX9MC&lpg=PA183&ots=...

> I don't always have to go looking for the function definition

That's because you get it inline for you with Xcode's autocomplete. IDEs do this for other languages, and the effect is the same.

I love named arguments. I wish my programming language of choice had them.

You should I this code.

    langFaultFuncParamNameWBB()

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