The following is a proposal that I sent in years ago, just prior to the
release of 1.0. Unfortunately it was turned down because of the huge
breakage that would be the result of it.

The current PDB has parameters that are position dependent. This is a very
inflexible and tedious interface. E.g. gimp_text has 17 parameters. A user
that would like to use this interface has to fill in a lot of parameters,
most of which she would be happy to use the default values of. Of course
there is no way to remember these parameters when writing scripts, and
instead one must resort to tedious copy and paste, and a result the signal
to noise ratio in the code is high.

A much better approach is to use "named parameters", or key/value pairs as
they are sometimes known. When these are used all parameters have default
values, and only those values that should be changed are given in the PDB call.

E.g. instead of doing the call

    gimp_bucket_fill(drawable, FG_BUCKET_FILL, NORMAL_MODE, 0.1, 13,
                     1, 100, 100)

where one must reference the manual to understand the parameters, the
following call would be made:

    gimp_bucket_fill("drawable", drawable,
                     "x",        100,
                     "y",        100)

Most paramaters have default values and only the values that are overridden
are listed. This is a much clearer interface.

It would probably be possible to create an implementation that is backwards
compatible, e.g. by checking if the first parameter is a string, and
only then interprete the rest of the parameters as a key, value pair list.

Key/values is really the natural interface to commands and interfaces, and
 a future Gimp should support it.