On Thu, 08 Aug 2002 12:19:10 +0200, Gavin Sinclair wrote:

> Sorry if I'm being closed-minded, but why is "insertElement" preferable
> to "insert", and why is "f:arg1 arg2" preferable to "f(arg1, arg2)"?

insertElement:at: is self-documenting; that is, just by looking at the
method name I can more or less know what the method does and what kind
of argument it takes. In Objective-C, this is a big pro when it comes 
to dealing with complex libraries such as WebObjects or Enterprise
Objects, because you don't have to constantly browse the documentation
just to understand what a piece of code does. I was a WebObjects
developer for 2 years and I *know* that Objective-C's method-naming
notation is "A Good Thing". The downside is that you can end up with
rather long method names.

Where does "f:arg1 arg2" come from? This is not what I proposed.
If you want named parameters with a syntax like f(arg1, arg2) you
end up with Python's solution or something like it, and I don't
find it particularly attractive.

Actually, what I'm proposing is *not* the introducion of named
parameters, but rather a different method naming convention having
the side effect of emulating named parameters (maybe my English is
betraying me here, please forgive me :-)

-- 
ste