On Monday, April 27, 2015 at 2:36:40 PM UTC-5, François Fayard wrote: > > Ok thanks. I did not think about normal. And my background is mathematics > (and I don't want to know Matlab ;-) ). Imagine how puzzling it could be > for many people. > > It totally violates the "Style Guide" which claims: "conciseness is > valued, but avoid abbreviation (indexin() rather than indxin()) as it > becomes difficult to remember whether and how particular words are > abbreviated." >
The chronology goes more like, "we had a method named `sprandn`, then someone wrote a style guide which contradicts it." As you correctly guessed/looked up this name is from the MATLAB branch of the Julia family tree. I suspect sparse matrix users will grab pitchforks if you force them to prepend the full word "sparse" to every one of their method names. (I live in a dense matrix universe and have no dog in that fight.)
