Re: WIP: default values for function parameters

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Dimitri Fontaine
<dfontaine@hi-media.com> wrote:
> That's why I'm preferring the common-lisp syntax of :param value, or its
> variant param: value.

FWIW there is no such common-lisp syntax. Colon is just a regular
symbol character and :param is just a regular symbol in common-lisp.
There is a convention that functions parse their argument lists
looking for such tokens as indicators of what to do with the next
argument but it's purely a convention. There's no syntactic
significance to the colon.

A similar problem arises with using Perl as a precedent. => is just a
regular operator in perl which quotes the lhs as a string if it's a
simple token and otherwise behaves just like a comma. That would be
very different from what we're talking about having it do here.

-- 
greg