Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.

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Re: Positional vs. keyword arguments in XML-RPC?

Author:	Chuck Shotton
Posted:	1/22/1999; 11:13:58 AM
Topic:	Positional vs. keyword arguments in XML-RPC?
Msg #:	2399 (In response to 2388)
Prev/Next:	2398 / 2400

Whether the underlying language that receives XML RPC parameters supports named parameters is somewhat irrelevant. If the RPC itself defines the names of the parameters it accepts and it defines the order that it wants those named parameters in, it is a simple matter for the underlying RPC to map named parameters into positional parameters and make the call.

Any programming language given a set of XML RPC parameters can certainly figure out what to do with them, even if the language itself doesn't support them directly. This is a valuable mechanism that should be part of the XML RPC standard. To omit it unnecessarily complicates the processing of RPC arguments for servers that can easily handle named parameters. Don't mix the generation and parsing of XML RPC object bodies with the passing of parameters to the underlying native code. The mapping of named parameters to the appropriate native procedure call is independent of the RPC object body syntax and can easily accomodate any underlying programming language.

I've put my thoughts on this and a few other RPC-related subjects on-line at http://www.biap.com/docs/xmlrpc.html

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