other similar package, e.g. multinma, baggr, use things like normal(0,1) or gamma(1,1) to specify the input argument prior. At the moment I just pass the name of the argument, e.g. in the previous example mean=0, sd=1 but its probably neater and more user-friendly to switch.
Basically, what these distribution functions do is just return a list of distribution names and parameters.