On Feb 21, 10 01:03, 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;
Isn't Array.reverse going to be deprecated?
(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;
I agree the difference is subtle. I propose
retro -> reverse
reverse -> inPlaceReverse
(In ObjC retro will be called reversedRange or rangeByReversingRange :p
The, well, advantage is no one will confuse what's going on.)
(c) I was looking for a short name because I presume the function will
be used often;
Out of my previous programs in any languages I've seldom used
foreach_reverse or its equivalent.
And we all use string very often yet anyone wants to look for a very
short name e.g. str? I mean, retro is only 3 characters shorter than
reversed or backward.
(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
