"spir" <[email protected]> wrote in message news:[email protected]... > On 03/04/2011 12:01 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote: >>> I have a preference for the longer names, but not a very strong one. >>> I'm >>> > not going to oppose the changes if others agree with you. >> I definitely like descriptive names, and my function names are often >> long, but I >> do tend to find that long names can get annoying - especially if you have >> to use >> them often. So, I think that you should generally choose shorter names as >> long >> as they are appropriately descriptive. A name like stripExt is clear >> enough - >> especially in context - to work quite well, so the longer name >> stripExtension is >> unnecessary, whereas ext may not be clear enough and the full name >> extension > > I tend to agree with you. > Especially on the point that (very) common names can be shorter. On one > hand, they are more easily inderstood & memorised precisely because they > are common; on the other, you get the maximum benefit in terms of > user-friendliness for the same reason (that they are common). Abbreviating > more rare names makes the code harder to understand for (very) few > benefit. > Now, is stripExt/stripExtension that common? I would say no. The day you > need it, you may have to write it several times because you're dealing > with a piece of code that copes with file names. Right, then, you may like > it be shorter. But this "pain" will soon stop; and maybe, probably?, you > won't have again to write that name for weeks or months. What do you > think? > > Another factor is the inherent clarity of the abbreviation. 'ext' can > certainly be interpreted in various ways. As you say, context helps much; > but it's a decisive argument for languages in which context prefixes, such > as module names, are commonly used: eg "path.stripExt(fileName)". But this > is not common practice in D, thus func names need be more precise, I > guess. >
Maybe it's just me having been knee-deep into the Win/MS-DOS world since well into the 8.3 days, but "ext" always instinctively means "file extension" to me. Of course, like I said, I happy with "extension" too, but just FWIW.
