Making a Sass mixin with optional arguments

A DRY'r Way of Doing It

And, generally, a neat trick to remove the quotes.

@mixin box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, $inset:"") {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color #{$inset};
  -moz-box-shadow:    $top $left $blur $color #{$inset};
  box-shadow:         $top $left $blur $color #{$inset};
}

SASS Version 3+, you can use unquote():

@mixin box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, $inset:"") {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
  -moz-box-shadow:    $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
  box-shadow:         $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
} 

Picked this up over here: pass a list to a mixin as a single argument with SASS

A so much better DRY way

is to pass $args... to the @mixin. That way, no matter how many $args you will pass. In the @input call, you can pass all args needed. Like so:

@mixin box-shadow($args...) {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $args;
  -moz-box-shadow: $args;
  box-shadow: $args;
}

And now you can reuse your box-shadow in every class you want by passing all needed args:

.my-box-shadow {
  @include box-shadow(2px 2px 5px #555, inset 0 0 0);
}

Sass supports @if statements. (See the documentation.)

You could write your mixin like this:

@mixin box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, $inset:"") {
  @if $inset != "" {
    -webkit-box-shadow:$top $left $blur $color $inset;
    -moz-box-shadow:$top $left $blur $color $inset;
    box-shadow:$top $left $blur $color $inset;
  }
}

You can put the property with null as a default value and if you don't pass the parameter it will not be interpreted.

@mixin box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, $inset:null) {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color $inset;
  -moz-box-shadow:    $top $left $blur $color $inset;
  box-shadow:         $top $left $blur $color $inset;
}

This means you can write the include statement like this.

@include box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color);

Instead of writing it like this.

@include box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, null);

As shown in the answer here

Old question, I know, but I think this is still relevant. Arguably, a clearer way of doing this is to use the unquote() function (which SASS has had since version 3.0.0):

@mixin box-shadow($top, $left, $blur, $color, $inset:"") {
  -webkit-box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
  -moz-box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
  box-shadow: $top $left $blur $color unquote($inset);
}

This is roughly equivalent to Josh's answer, but I think the explicitly named function is less obfuscated than the string interpolation syntax.