Andrei Alexandrescu wrote: > This is the third time I'm asking: what is a list of allegedly silly > names in phobos? Far as I can tell the case against "retro" and "iota" > is rather tenuous. So what are others? readText? topN? setDifference? > Talk to me.
"retro" is unusual, but at least I know what it means. I may not like it, but I can use it. "iota" is horrible. The last ten times I saw "iota", it was a typo of "itoa". Like all Greek letters, 'ι' is used as a shorthand for all kinds of different meanings in different fields of science and mathematics. It's a useful shorthand because it's a single letter. Spelling it out as "iota" wastes space without disambiguating between all the different possible meanings of 'ι'. If you're going to go for a single-letter name, "i" is better than "iota". It's just as arbitrary, it's just as ambiguous, I have just as little idea what it means, but it's shorter to write, and you don't need to know the English names of Greek letters to recognize it. -- Rainer Deyke - [email protected]
