On Fri, Aug 2, 2013 at 1:49 AM, Chris Travers <chris.travers@gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's my $0.02
>
> Stored procedures have a bunch of problems historically. Part of this is
> because the interface traditionally is pretty spartan, and partly because
> some people take them too far.
>
> The first issue is that if you have a stored procedure which takes 2
> arguments and you need to extend it to three, then you have to change every
> call in the calling application. This can create a maintenance problem.
> Variadic functions help somewhat but there are limits to what a variadic
> function can do here.
This is true of most popular languages. The other defenses are
default arguments (use very sparingly), overloading, and named
parameter arguments. If you're writing library routines that need to
accommodate a lot of behaviors, named arguments + use of defaults is a
pretty neat way to go.
merlin