Dear all! There are now pull requests (see below) that attempt more uniformity. I think that the following de facto consensus emerged:
1. in general, we keep the old names as aliases, but replace occurences of the old names also in the codebase 2. we use n_xxx for methods that are used frequently and number_of_xxx for the rest Some of the pull requests have already positive review, some I made "needs: info", because I do not want to make a silly decision. I don't think that any of them are already merged. In general, I see two arguments in favour of the pull requests, and one against: * it makes it easier for the casual user to remember the method names * it makes it possible to grep for such methods (as opposed to `nrows`) * the aliases pollute the name space The last point implies that we should be careful in choosing the new method names. For example, I just realize that Graph.number_of_connected_components might be better just Graph.n_components. So, please voice your opinion now :-) A few people (including myself) warn that the old methods should not be deprecated, even though this might be tempting for better aesthetics. We have to keep in mind that there is code outside that uses the old method names which we do not control, and which is run only rarely. For example, there is a code snippet for almost every statistic in the findstat database, many of which would be affected in this particular case. It would be a shame if these would stop working. Best wishes, Martin https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40875 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40887 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40914 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40917 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40918 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40932 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40939 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40940 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40941 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40942 https://github.com/sagemath/sage/pull/40943 On Thursday, 25 September 2025 at 13:42:13 UTC+2 Frédéric Chapoton wrote: > Hello, > > I think it will be hard to achieve consistency on this matter. Unless of > course somebody wants to spent the next few years doing that. Any volunteer > ? > > (0) I think we should allow "n*" and "n_*" and "number_of_*" only. I have > a preference for "n_*". > > (1) My current proposal is to use "n_*" everywhere in geometry/ This is a > small thing, and ready for review. > > (2) one could also easily get rid of all "num_*" as there are not so many. > This is just annoying for graphs, > > (3) concerning alias versus deprecation, I would prefer to deprecate. But > we can also keep the aliases and let our heirs do the deprecation. > > Frédéric > > > > Le jeudi 25 septembre 2025 à 03:05:30 UTC+2, Kwankyu Lee a écrit : > >> I regard >> >> "num_xxx", "n_xxx" and "nxxx" >> >> as different abbreviations of "number_of_xxx". So to abbreviate "number", >> we are using "num" and "n". I think we should choose just one. I prefer "n" >> (and hate "num"). >> >> Hence in my opinion, we should keep >> >> (1) "number_of_" like in "number_of_facets" >> (2) "n_" like in "n_facets" >> (3) "n" like in "ngens" >> >> and use (3) for names that occur very frequently. >> >> Kwankyu >> > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sage-devel" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/sage-devel/804af5fd-c14e-4670-ad1c-e7529bd516c1n%40googlegroups.com.
