Re: [sv-ec]E-mail Vote: Closes 12am PST October 10th 2007

From: Steven Sharp <sharp_at_.....>
Date: Thu Oct 11 2007 - 12:18:40 PDT
>From: Neil Korpusik <Neil.Korpusik@sun.com>

>1560   no
>
>   I will change my vote to yes if this one change is removed from the 
proposal.
>
>   Why change the word prototype to syntax?
>      All of the Queue methods described in 7.11.2 mention the word prototype.
>      Why is it being changed to syntax for just the delete method?

Neil,

This wording was copied from the description of the associative array
delete() method.

I also wondered at first why it used the word "syntax" instead of
"prototype".  But when I looked more closely at it, I realized why.
This is only a pseudo-prototype, because it specifies something that
cannot actually be specified in a prototype.  The argument is optional.
It doesn't have a default value; it is truly optional, with a different
meaning when the argument is missing than for any value of it.

It would have been possible to specify it to have a special default value
like -1, and then specify that an index of -1 means to delete everything.
This would work because -1 is never a valid index for a queue.  Dave Rich
had suggested something like this, because he thought there were no cases
of truly optional arguments in the language.  However, this wouldn't
eliminate the concept of a truly optional argument, because that would
still exist in the associative array delete() case.  So it would just
make the queue delete() description and behavior uglier.

Steven Sharp
sharp@cadence.com


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Received on Thu Oct 11 12:18:56 2007

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