--- Steffen Mueller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Damian Conway wrote: > > Larry wrote: > > > >> On the other hand, I could see an argument that said anyone who > >> doesn't know what .arity means shouldn't be writing routines that > >> depend on it... > > > That was more or less my line of thought. > > Now, I think I'll dare claim my English is not exactly bad for a 21 > year-old non-native speaker. Being a physics and CS student, I do > also have mathematical background, but it still took me a few seconds > to figure out "arity" *in this context*. Maybe that's because I can't > think of an exact German equivalent either; maybe it's because I don't > think a function's arity is quite the same as it's *minimum* number of > parameters? I mean, it makes sense in a functional language... but > you don't have functions with a variable number of arguments there.
(Your English sounds pretty darned good to me. :) > To cut this short: I think req or reqargs or somesuch would be > better. Why choose the method names that sound more like computer > science for the very sake of that? FWIW, I'm a CS professional with an appalling lack of mathematical background (though I scored above the math average for Engineers on my GRE, and didn't miss any of the logic questions). I'd never *heard* of "arity", but tend to use esoteric language attributes rather often (which is not a boast -- it's a rather bad habit, but there it is). Anyway, I like writing functions and methods that DWIM, but sometimes WIM takes some doing. I'd rather have a name that means something to me, too.... though to be honest, "arity" would mean something to me, if someone would just explain it, lol.... Paul __________________________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop! http://platinum.yahoo.com
