Dreaming of new generation IDE

[bartc]

"Steve Holden" <steve at holdenweb.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.1998.1265399766.28905.python-list at python.org...
> Arnaud Delobelle wrote:
>> Robert Kern <robert.kern at gmail.com> writes:
>>
>>> I prefer Guido's formulation (which, naturally, I can't find a direct
>>> quote for right now): if you expect that a boolean argument is only
>>> going to take *literal* True or False, then it should be split into
>>> two functions.
>>
>> So rather than three boolean arguments, would you have eight functions?
>>
> If there's genuinely a need for that functionality, yes.

So you want a function such as drawtext(s, bold=true, italic=false, 
underline=true) to be split into:

drawtext(s)
drawtextb(s)
drawtexti(s)
drawtextu(s)
drawtextbi(s)
drawtextbu(s)
drawtextiu(s)
drawtextbiu(s)

Which of course is going to be fun if the bold/italic/underline values are 
not constants; instead of writing:

drawtext(s,b,i,u)

you have to say:

if b==0 and i==0 and u==0:
    drawtext(s)
elif b==1 and i==0 and u==0:
    drawtextb(s)

and so on. With half-a-dozen or more booleans, this becomes completely 
impractical.

-- 
Bartc