Faré wrote: >> In that case, maybe instead of trying to take a real English word that >> > already has a meaning, we should take a short phrase that means exactly >> > what we will do: >> > >> > DO-DEFAULT-OPERATION-ON-SYSTEM >> > to be shortened to >> > DDO >> > >> > [I don't like DoS or DDoS for obvious reasons! ;-)] >> > >> > I think DEFAULT-OP is a better name than BUILD-OP because it says what >> > it means. >> > > While semantically correct, that is quite ugly, and ultimately not > very helpful, because it fails to convey intent to someone who is not > familiar with ASDF already, and someone who is familiar doesn't need > to be reminded such thing.
Well, but consider this hypothetical person who doesn't know what's going to happen and who isn't familiar with ASDF already. S/he types (asdf:make "foo") and *either* gets foo loaded into his/her lisp image or.... an executable file gets dropped onto his/her disk? This is going to be confusing no matter *what* word we use. I can't imagine why we would want to have a command that is "either build or run or do something else with this system." To be honest, I am not too hung up over this proposed command, simply because I can't imagine myself ever wanting to use it instead of LOAD-SYSTEM, because I don't see the utility of issuing a command that will do something that I don't know and can't predict. Or more accurately, that MIGHT do what I expect and might do something radically different. It seems like you have two objectives with this build operation: 1. Have a default command. This seems primarily useful for systems that will *not* be loaded, and where the user expects something else to happen. In that case, it seems to me we would be better off NOT making this mostly be an alias to LOAD-SYSTEM. If LOAD-SYSTEM is the right thing, we should just tell ASDF to load the system. 2. Make a *shorter* alias to LOAD-SYSTEM. This seems to me to be a different objective than #1, and I'm not sure trying to achieve both with a single new addition to ASDF is The Right Thing. Best, r
