Named parameter
Named parameter
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Named parameter

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Named parameter

In computer programming, named parameters, named-parameter arguments, named arguments or keyword arguments refer to a computer language's support for function calls to clearly associate each argument with a given parameter within the function call.

A function call using named parameters differs from a regular function call in that the arguments are passed by associating each one with a parameter name, instead of providing an ordered list of arguments.

For example, consider this Java or C# method call that doesn't use named parameters:

Using named parameters in Python, the call can be written as:

Using named parameters in PHP, the call can be written as:

The version with positional arguments is more implicit. The versions that name parameters are more explicit. Depending on circumstance, a programmer may find one or the other to be easier to read.

Named parameters are supported explicitly in many languages. A non-exhaustive selection of examples includes Ada, C# 4.0+, Ceylon[citation needed], ColdFusion Markup Language (CFML)[citation needed], Common Lisp, Fortran[citation needed], IDL[citation needed], Kotlin, Mathematica[citation needed], Nim, PL/SQL[citation needed], PowerShell[citation needed], Python, R, PHP, Ruby, Scala, Smalltalk[citation needed], Swift and Visual Basic. Objective-C does not have named parameters (even though parts of the method name may look like named parameters).
In C++, you can achieve named parameters by using designated initializers since C++20, like so:

In languages that do not support named parameters, the order of arguments in a function call is necessarily fixed, since it is the only way that the language can identify which argument is intended to be used for which parameter.

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