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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: Tue, 4 Mar 2025 09:33:47 +0000
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 04/03/2025 07:30, c186282 wrote:
> On 3/4/25 1:25 AM, rbowman wrote:
>> On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 23:02:44 -0500, c186282 wrote:
>>
>>>     It's easy to kinda drift into that during development, you always
>>>     think of ONE more thing you need to pass. However stage two, you put
>>>     all that crap in a struct and pass one pointer. Each function can
>>>     extract what it needs from that struct and ignore the rest.
>>
>> I never made it to anywhere close to 60 parameters. We did have one
>> utility that took 22 command line parameters but it was never meant to be
>> invoked manually and came with a csh. Even then they all were stuffed 
>> into
>> a struct before the real function was called.
>>
>> Even worse, the parameters were field widths in a positional record. I
>> truly hate positional records but the damn things live on.
> 
>    Hey, they have a function and certain simplicity.
> 
>    Anyway, have writ many pgms where functions might
>    need access to a LOT of params - 'C'/Python/Pascal -
>    and the best way is to create a struct/record/list/dict
>    from which those functions can extract what they need,
>    and update what they need. Just send a pointer.
>    NO need for 60 discrete params.

Unless its a library function.
That doesn't take a pointer to a struct.

-- 
"First, find out who are the people you can not criticise. They are your 
oppressors."
      - George Orwell