On 12/7/10 8:30 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:
> David Kastrup writes:
> 
>  > I don't think anybody minds the features.
> 
> IIRC rms has recently declared his dislike for CL-style keyword
> arguments.  I suppose that's part of the "syntactic complexity" you
> mention, but MON KEY OTOH points out cases where he'd like to use
> them.  So there are some fundamental disagreements here.

I'd just like to add my support for keyword arguments. Functions like
write-region are both horrible and brittle because their parameters are
both numerous and overloaded; specific functionality can be more simply
expressed with using keyword arguments. Precedent can be seen in
play-sound, defcustom, and elsewhere. The performance arguments opposing
keyword arguments don't seem to be supported by benchmarks, and in any
case, most functions, especially ones with rich functionality, aren't on
the fast path.