Good Use Case for Named Arguments

 
I found what I consider a really great use case for using keyword arguments. I'm sure there are tons of them, I just want to list this one.

Here I have some code that I had in CPU Simulator that I was using to test a FlipFlopChain, which is essentially just an N Bit Memory (maybe I'll rename it that).

    val data = AllGeneratorNumber(8)
    val chain = FlipFlopChain(data, Generator.on)
    ...

Notice that the second parameter to FlipFlopChain is Generator.on. What is this parameter though? We have to navigate into FlipFlopChain just to find out that it represents the write bit. If we didn't have the source, we might have no idea.

So I changed the code to make it more explicit, by declaring a writeBit val.

    val data = AllGeneratorNumber(8)
    val writeBit = Generator.on
    val chain = FlipFlopChain(data, writeBit)
    ...

Note that I never use the writeBit again in the test code, its just there to help the reader understand what that second parameter is.

With keyword arguments, there is a much better solution:

    val data = AllGeneratorNumber(8)
    val chain = FlipFlopChain(data, writeBit=Generator.on)
    ...

Win!