yigal chripun wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:
yigal chripun wrote:
Nick Sabalausky Wrote:
"Justin Johansson" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
Nick Sabalausky wrote:
Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with
"retro-" when talking to a english-speaking person, and
even if they're uneducated, they'll most likely have a good
idea what is meant by that prefix.
What about persons with English not as a first language?
I do realize that different native languages can be an issue,
but at some point a library has to use *some* language, and the
established standard for phobos just happens to be english. If
we start banning terms from use in a language or a library on
the basis of whether a non-native english speaker is likely to
know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for
certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given
language/library because there's no guarantee non-native
speakers would know any of it.
For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I
tried to use it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except
nyet and da (and I'm not even sure of the correct spellings of
those - in either roman or cyrillic). And I would be well aware
that I wouldn't be able to assume I knew what something did
without a little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize
that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking
programmers, and that it's an issue native english speaking
programmers like me will probably never be able to truly
understand, but until we get to some hypothetcal point in the
future where everyone speaks the same language, then, again, at
some point there really is no choice but to just assume at
least some particular language.
Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch
of vague meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me
all of about a minute to learn that "string" had nothing to do
with the stuff cloth is made of and stitched together with. And
"SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to an english
speaker, but I still learned it quickly enough. So even if I
wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than "old
style", I'm sure I still could have gotten used to it very
quickly, especially considering that in 99.99% of contexts it's
going to be pretty damn clear that it's not being used to refer
to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and flock-of-seagulls
haircuts.
This is being silly (and needlessly long). There's no need to
collect statistics on the level of English of non-native D
programmers worldwide to decide what name to use for a function.
It's very simple actually: you want to name a function that
reverses your range and you have several valid names for it,
please choose the most common word (the first that comes to mind)
which in this case is (surprise!) - "reverse". (or any variation
that makes sense in this particular case, like "reversed")
simple logic, don't you agree? Any human language has more than
one way to express oneself. The best way to reach a wide (and
international) audience is to use the most common phrases - don't
go all academic on me with Latin or Shakespearean words and don't
go getho on me with misspelled slang. Is that so much to ask for?
There's no reason to get agitated as nobody is trying to push
incomprehensible crap on anyone. The problem I was confronted with
was:
(a) "reverse" was already taken;
(b) I found "reversed" too subtly different from "reverse".
Besides, it wasn't clear to me that it was descriptive enough -
e.g. some people might believe that "reversed" returns a reversed
copy of the range;
(c) I was looking for a short name because I presume the function
will be used often;
(d) In my experience names that are slightly odd but evocative tend
to stick to memory.
So I chose "retro". What exactly seems to be the problem? If half
of Phobos' names were weird, I'd say fine, but this discussion
latched on poor "retro" and "iota" as if posters' lives depended on
it. Again: how exactly are these two names preventing you from
getting work done?
Andrei
you just refuse to get it.
Well that doesn't quite set up the stage nicely for a dialog. I
explained you what constraints I was under when choosing one particular
name. You then ignore the entire explanation by labeling me as
illogically stubborn. At the same time, you keep on waxing indignant
about a very general problem with Phobos but consistently omit to
provide more supporting evidence than "retro" and "iota".
It's not the specific retro function that
is so frustrating to me. any public API (and especially so for the
standard library) *must* have a consistent naming scheme. It *must*
prefer clarity over shortness and it *must* be designed such that it
will lead to easier understanding of code using it _without_
referring to the manual every function call. phobos fails on all the
above.
I agree that Phobos, being a palimpsest[1] on which several people
wrote, currently mixes a number of styles and names. Would be great if
you added some concrete details that would help us improve things. What
would be a good example of Phobos code that is currently next to
incomprehensible due to poor choices of names, and what would be a good
consistent naming scheme that would improve on that?
Andrei
[1] The nerve!
