[BLD] NAU as external function?

Harold, Michael,

I included NAU as external function in PRD, because they are in BLD and 
on Gary's insistance. But I still have a doubt, even in BLD: what are 
they? Is there any language (LP or else) that support them?

Cheers,

Christian

Gary Hallmark wrote:

> NAU for external functions means that you give each arg a name and pass 
> arguments using (arg-name, arg-value) pairs.
> 
> I guess we could have done that for DTB but we didn't; we use positional 
> arguments instead.  (It might be kind of nice to have meaningful 
> argument names in the XML RIF document that a consumer receives)
> 
> I see no reason to deviate from BLD on this point. Because I expect many 
> implementations to restrict their usage of external functions to those 
> defined in DTB, and because DTB does not use NAU, I expect this will be 
> a rarely used feature (in BLD and PRD)
> 
> Christian de Sainte Marie wrote:
> 
>> Gary,
>>
>> Gary Hallmark wrote:
>>
>>>>
>>>> #4: include NAU in PRD FPWD, add an editor's note and raise an issue 
>>>> (was: option 2 in [1]).
>>
>>
>> I was implementing that when I noticed that, according to the PS, an 
>> external TERM (that is, an external function call) could also have 
>> named arguments.
>>
>> Is this really what you want? It does not make sense to me (in the 
>> proper sense: I do not understand what it means), but if this is what 
>> you want, I will put it in PRD FPWD (and I will assume that you know 
>> what it means, of course :-)
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Christian
>>
> 
>