>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 -- This message has been scanned for viruses and dangerous content by MailScanner, and is believed to be clean.Received on Thu Oct 11 12:18:56 2007
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