On 30/12/2008, at 10:31 AM, Damien Katz wrote:
The current rule is that every couch-domain value has a leading
underscore when it appears in the root of a document. Your rule
would mean that throughout the API, everything that has special
significance should have an underscore. In views (key -> _key, value
-> _value) in urls ( GET /db/doc?_rev="...") and design docs (views -
> _views, map -> _map). That rule is simpler, but I think all the
leading underscores are ugly (aethetics) and require more
unnecessary typing (efficiency) and gain you no additional behaviors
(functionality), and all for the sake of consistency to a slightly
simpler rule.
i.e. this simpler rule promotes consistency, which leads to more
reliable understanding, over writing.
In all cases one should prefer readability/comprehensibility over
writability. That is a principle worth following.
And as far as writing is concerned, using name identity for values
that appear in multiple contexts makes it easier to write polymorphic
code e.g. a function that extracts the document id and revision from
either a view row or the document value (possibly) contained within.
Antony Blakey
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