Rainer Deyke wrote:
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.
"iota" is already present with the same semantics in 1.25 languages: C++
and Go. Anyhow, what's a better name?
Andrei
