Also, there's always [observation].
Stephen Colebourne wrote:
Observable is named after the Observer pattern in my eyes. Notifying is OK as a name, and possibly clearer in intent, however I'm not sure that a commons component named [notifying] quite sounds right. [notify] maybe, but then thats not quite right either. Any other naming views? Stephen
----- Original Message ----- From: "Neil O'Toole" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
--- Stephen Colebourne <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
We've had all positives so far. I'm going to take this as agreed and move the code to a new sandbox project. I reckon [observable] is probably the best name, although I'm open to offers.
I don't have strongly held opinions on the naming, but I went through the process of picking a name for a collections observable/notifying/eventsending/callbacking package, and I figured I'd share the thoughts I had on it.
Firstly, it certainly should be [observable] rather than [observed], but I'm not going to pretend to remember enough about english grammar to explain why [observable] is better :)
I had originally considered this [observable] name when I set about creating my implementation. One of the first things I did (this was circa Sep 2002 I think) was search on the web to see if anybody else had already implemented such a package. The snippet of text that decisively turned me away from the [observable] name was this:
Observability. An observable collection is one in which it is
possible to view the elements in a collection.
@ http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/edison/users007.html
... which of course is the crux of the issue. The familiar implementations of the collections API are all observable, in that you can examine the elements of the collection, such as via an iterator. But the [notifying/observable] implementations we've developed *actively* signal information, typically when the collection changes (although that is not necessarily the case - I could envisage an implementation that sends an event when the collection changes *or* every X seconds, or when some other predicate is satisfied).
So, rather than denoting passivity, I figured the name needed to indicate the "active signaling of state information by the object being observed". A snappier name for this behaviour is "notification", so I went with the name [notifyingcollections] over [observablecollections]. You also save a letter in typing ;)
Though I don't feel very strongly about it, I still believe that [notifying] is a more indicative name than [observable], and I would suggest we use it. However, I still have a sneaking suspicion that there is a fugitive word out there that better captures the essence of the "active signalling of state information by the object being observed", so hats off to anyone who can conjure it up :)
neil
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