On Tuesday, January 11, 2011 12:44:57 Nick Sabalausky wrote: > "Walter Bright" <[email protected]> wrote in message > news:[email protected]... > > > Ary Borenszweig wrote: > >> Why care where they come from? Why not make them intuitive? Say, like, > >> "Always > >> camel case"? > > > > Because people are used to those names due to their wide use. It's the > > same reason that we still use Qwerty keyboards. > > Then why switch langauges at all? > > When you move to a different language you expect that language is going to > have its own set of conventions. And even more than that, you also expect > it to at least be internally-consistent, not a grab-bag of different > styles. Are they really supposed to remember "Oh, oh, this func comes from > this language, so it's capitalized this way, and that one comes from that > language so it's capitalized that way..." > > Not only that, but D has far, far bigger, more significant differences from > Ruby/Python/JS/etc than the capitalization of a few functions. If people > are going to come over and get used to *those* changes, then using toLower > instead of tolower is going to be a downright triviality for them. Your > cart is before your horse.
I agree. Having the functions named similarly so that they're quickly recognized is good - if a function has a particular name in a variety of languages, why not give it essentially the same name in D? But I don't see why it must be _exactly_ the same name. At least using the same casing as the rest of Phobos. Unless you're directly porting code, the fact that it's toLower instead of tolower really shouldn't be an issue. It's a new a language, a new library, you're going to have to learn how it works anyway. The function names don't need to be _exactly_ the same as other languages. It does look bad when functions in Phobos don't follow the same naming conventions as the rest of it, and it makes it much harder to remember exactly how they're named. So, I'm all for picking names which are essentially the same as functions with the same functionality in other languages, but I think that insisting that the casing of the names match the casing of the functions from other languages when it doesn't match how functions are normally cased in Phobos is definitely a bad idea. Not to mention, I don't think that I've ever heard anyone complain that the casing on a function in Phobos didn't match the casing of a function with essentially the same name in another language, but complaints definitely pop up about how some of the std.string functions don't use the same casing as the rest of Phobos. I vote for consistency. Using essentially the same names for functions as is used in other languages is great. Insisting on the same casing for the function names strikes me as inconsistent and undesirable. I find that it increases the burden of remembering function names rather than reducing it. - Jonathan M Davis
