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Too late... I saw, I clicked, I was conquered. Fortunately I have to leave shortly for a few days of training in Las Vegas, so I have an escape hatch. The PC doesn't have a long enough cord to reach that far.
Will Rogers never met me.
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A man, whose level of drunkenness was bordering on the absurd, stood up to leave a bar and fell flat on his face.
"Maybe all I need is some fresh air," thought the man as he crawled outside.
He tried to stand up again, but fell face first into the mud.
"Screw it," he thought. "I'll just crawl home."
The next morning, his wife found him on the doorstep asleep.
"You went out drinking last night, didn't you?" she said.
"Uh, yes," he said sheepishly. "How did you know?"
"You left your wheelchair at the bar again."
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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Not sure about re-post. And even if it is, it made me laugh on Monday morning An upvote for that !
Thanks,
M
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That was Leslie Nielsen in the wheelchair.
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Key-Value Options:
Let's say you have a function that can take a bunch of options for how to build something, say some auto-generated HTML, when passing them as parameters is just too cumbersome? Personally, I would just put all the options into a struct and pass an instance of the struct into the function. The nice thing about that is, the struct (or class, if you wish) documents all the possible options.
Now, in the land of Ruby, I see everybody everywhere using key-value pairs associated with symbols, like this:
{option1: true, option2: "foobar", option3: 42}
Now of course the symbols usually have some intelligent meaning, but you have absolutely no clue what these optional parameters are unless you look up the online documentation (if it exists) and then can be sprawled across numerous pages on the website.
And worse, in the Ruby code, these options are of course usually tested using the symbol:
if opts[:option1] ... end
such that, if you mistype the "key" (symbol), nothing is going to complain to you, unless the programmer checks the option list for unknown options, which I have NEVER seen done.
Now, there's lots of alternatives in the, say, C# world. Your function can take a variable number of parameters. You can require that the caller provides a callback for resolving options. You can just put everything into the function's parameter list, and so forth. Or, like Rubyists, you can pass in a dictionary or some such thing of options.
Valueless Options (aka flags):
So far, the above discussion deals with options that have associated values. There is also the issue of "valueless" options -- if the "key" is present, then the option is "selected." One of the most common ways of passing in valueless options to a function in most languages is of course with an enum, especially when you can use the "or" operator to combine multiple valueless options. Now, mind you, in Ruby, there is no concept of an enum, which is a serious drawback in my opinion.
But I'm curious what people consider to be their own best practice.
Marc
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I would have to go with wrapping the parameters in a struct/class. That way, I can put all sorts of validation in there that gives the object some context.
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Pete O'Hanlon wrote: That way, I can put all sorts of validation in there that gives the object some context.
My thinking as well. Thank you for the response!
Marc
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Some more advantages; it's more readable when there are lots of arguments, one can easily modify the parameter-set without having to touch each method, and one can even inherit a new set of parameters.
EventArgs - wonderfull example.
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
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Also protects you when you have to add another option.
ed
~"Watch your thoughts; they become your words. Watch your words they become your actions.
Watch your actions; they become your habits. Watch your habits; they become your character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny."
-Frank Outlaw.
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I'm personally not a big fan of it, but in .NET you have optional parameters.
They look like the example you showed in Ruby (but I don't know if they're the same thing since I don't know Ruby).
For example:
private void SomeMethod(bool useThisOption = true, string optionName = "")
{
}
private void UseOptionalParams()
{
this.SomeMethod(optionName: "MyOption");
}
For more information: Named and Optional Arguments[^]
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I suspect that Marc, as a highly accomplished .NET developer, is well aware of this.
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I suspect so too, but he didn't mention it and he did ask for it 
I learned a little from it too, because I wanted to give an Attribute as example and then I found out attributes behave like they have optional parameters while they are actually just properties that can be set in the constructor!
So I just gave a little example using methods for all the folks reading this and thinking to themselves "what's he talking about?"
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I believe that strictly speaking, you do NOT have optional parameter in .NET.
You have it in C#. But it is handled solely by the compiler, at compile time. Sort of synthetic sugar. (Or sugar-free, since we are talking about parameters who are not there in the source code.) In the .NET assembly, noone can tell whether the value specified as default in the function declaration was really defaulted or specified explicitly by the caller.
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Good point. Although .NET has sort of become a synonym for C# and VB and they both support it
Strictly speaking you're right though.
It's an OO world.
public class SanderRossel : Lazy<Person>
{
public void DoWork()
{
throw new NotSupportedException();
}
}
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I've tried a number of different ways, and found a class/message to be the most convenient. However, it does get a bit tedious to implement an interface where every method has it's own custom object even for simple calls, depending on language support.
One set of methods in the current app I work on has a string of 6 int? parameters in a row, and keeping them in order is a pain in the butt.
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I also subscribe to the struct approach (of course you need to determine the break even point between how many parameters you have before it is worth wrapping them in a struct), but am going to go a little further. I have projects where the function I wish to call may be several layers deeper or I need to add a new request from a client UI and direct a call to a new function on the server - I know you have all been there too and know what I am talking about.
In some of my projects, I have a generic message class that can be XML'ified (, compressed, encrypted) and transmitted between server and client. The class has a member variable, which is a list of name/value pairs and this can be used directly for most parameters. When adding new stuff, only the sender and receiver function need to know about the parameters and all layers in between just work without being updated. For more advanced parameters, such as structs, the class has a string member variable that can be an XML string containing any kind of object that has been serialized to XML.
That whole core is kind of old and would probably benefit from being updated to JSON.
If extreme performance is an issue, I avoid the whole back and forth string conversion and use a different mechanism, but for normal applications the processing time is plenty fast enough and the savings in maintenance when you need to add a new parameter is well worth it.
Soren Madsen
"When you don't know what you're doing it's best to do it quickly" - Jase #DuckDynasty
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In most cases I consider a large number of parameters (let say over 8) as design flaw, however it is possible that you end with such a list, in which case I would use struct/class...
I'm not questioning your powers of observation; I'm merely remarking upon the paradox of asking a masked man who he is. (V)
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In the old days, I was working with a Fortran compilers where we had to push the release due to one (important) customer who had run into a limitation of the previous one: It could take only 99 (ninety-nine) parameters. The new version could handle 128 parameters, which was sufficient for the immediate needs of the customer, but the design allowed expansion to 256 parameters.
If there ever was a case for Fortran COMMON blocks, I would call this a candidate.
(Don't take me wrong - I am not suggesting using COMMON blocks as good programming practice. Nor is 100+ function parameters.)
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COMMON is certainly good "programming practice" as long as each COMMON is named and contains a single value. Otherwise I submit that COMMON should be found non-complying in coding standards.
Gus Gustafson
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When Dealing with Microsoft related programming products creating your procedures with the parameters (Sender as object, e as eventArgs) as an extremely recommended practice, and have your parameter class inherit from system.eventArgs.
This way your code naturally interacts with windows runtime components.
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Except that you have created event arguments for use with none events. The sender is probably going to be completely useless.
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You do understand that we are working with event driven programming right? The entire inner working of the object programming model has a point of origin and the event that triggered it.
You should always be making your code generic as it can be understood by everything, and your procedure should be tread safe - which means everything you need should be passed as a parameter.
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Colborne_Greg wrote: You do understand that we are working with event driven programming right?
That's a very narrow point of view, focused on one technology set. At no stage did Marc state he was asking about an event. And while there is a point of origin, there's no guarantee that he is responding to an event - you may have noticed that Marc was talking in a generic sense, hence the reason he mentioned ROR. So, in the case of doing something like processing a batch input on a file, forcing the programming model to use an event signature doesn't really make sense.Colborne_Greg wrote: You should always be making your code generic as it can be understood by everything, and your procedure should be tread safe - which means everything you need should be passed as a parameter.
And that is why my response, at the top of this thread, stated that I would normally wrap things up into an object.
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