On Thu, Dec 4, 2008 at 8:45 AM, Steven D'Aprano <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Thu, 04 Dec 2008 20:53:38 +1000, James Mills wrote: > >> Readability of your code becomes very important especially if you're >> working with many developers over time. >> >> 1. Use sensible meaningful names. >> 2. Don't use abbreviations. > > This is excellent advice, but remember, what is a sensible meaningful > name is domain-specific. In a maths library, this would be sensible: > > def poly(x): > return 4*x**3 -2*x**2 +3*x -7 > > and this ridiculous: > > def poly(real_number): > return 4*real_number**3 -2*real_number**2 +3*real_number -7 > >
I actually wonder. The former is "sensible" in a math context because there's a very long tradition in mathematics of using terse, inscrutable placeholders for terms. I'm not a mathematician and I don't know anything about the history of mathematical notation, but I'd guess this has something to do with the fact that maths has historically been done with a pencil and paper, and that terseness is an important quality when you have a limited canvas and lots of stuff to write. Aside from the cultural indoctrination, though (and that may be a real and strong force when dealing with math software, and I don't want to discount it in general, just for purposes of this discussion) why is it more sensible to use "x" here instead of "number" or "real" or "real_number" or something else? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
