All of the mathematicians I know won’t bother to read them this way (if there’s 
no ambiguity, of course). Long names can be good in scientific papers, but in 
practice one should be a complete boring jerk to name them like this.
It would be a pain typing even the word ‘identity’ in a game engine over and 
over. I write for Unity3d, and Vector3.zero and Vector3.one are just fine, but 
Quaternion.identity makes code look too verbose, so I `static readonly QI = 
Quaternion.identity` it.
Long names require special training to get comfortable with them, and sometimes 
it even looks like a superpower to me.


On 10 Apr 2014, at 19:07, Tommi <[email protected]> wrote:

> Actually, I'd like to reiterate my original view that num::Zero should be 
> renamed to AdditiveIdentity (bear with me) based on the fact that when 
> mathematicians use the symbol 0 to denote additive identity, the symbol 0 is 
> not read "zero", but as "additive identity".
> 
> All the reasoning above applies to renaming num::One to 
> MultiplicativeIdentity as well (as it pertains to symbol 1 denoting 
> multiplicative identity).
> 
> If those names are too long, the shortened AddIdentity and MulIdentity could 
> be used instead. 
> 
> 
> On 10 Apr 2014, at 00:06, Tommi Tissari <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
>> On 09 Apr 2014, at 23:42, Kevin Ballard <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>>> The number 0 is the additive identity for numbers. But informally, the 
>>> additive identity for other things can be called "zero" without problem.
>> 
>> Ok, so it seems. From
>> http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_(mathematics)
>> 
>> The number 0 is the additive identity (identity element for the binary 
>> operation of addition) for integers, real numbers, and complex numbers. For 
>> every number a, including 0 itself,
>> 
>> In a more general context, when a binary operation is denoted with + and has 
>> an identity, this identity is commonly denoted by the symbol 0 (zero) and 
>> called an additive identity.
>> 
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