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Postings from November 2016
Sam Kington wrote: >Surely this is backwards? If anything, the fact that a sub's parameters >can be introspected makes it *easier* to change them, because you can >expect (some of) the code calling that sub to introspect the required >parameters and adjust its own behaviour accordingly, rather than >hard-coding which parameters it supplied? You're imagining a rather bizarre situation here. You're supposing a change being made to the sub's calling interface that we would normally regard as an incompatible API change. We do not generally expect calls to a sub to change between versions of the sub. If you do expect them to change, based on metadata supplied with the sub, that would amount to a very strange API. Your "some of" exposes a problem. If the calling interface does vary in this way, it would require *all* call sites to pay attention to the metadata that says which parameter goes where. No hard-coded call would be safe. >But I don't see how it would be actively harmful. To have such a bizarre API wouldn't really be actively harmful, it would just be an awful hassle to use. But that is not the situation that we were discussing. -zeframThread Previous | Thread Next