Am 01.08.2014 20:50, schrieb Walter Bright:
On 8/1/2014 7:08 AM, Daniel Gibson wrote:
I'm not a native speaker..
I couldn't tell - your english is excellent.
Thank you :)
.. but even if I were: words used for constructs/function-names/... in
programming often don't 100% match their "real" meaning (as used in human
communication)[1] - why should it be different for assert(),
especially when not
implemented/used like that in many popular programming languages?
Every discipline has its own jargon.
Sure, and in programming jargon assert() until now was a runtime check
that could be deactivated - even though the "spoken language" word
"assert" might imply more.
For example, what would "sick" mean
to a motorhead?
You mean "motorhead" like in someone who likes cars or like in the the
heavy metal band? :-P
(Non-native speakers probably associate motorhead with the band and
often don't know the original meaning)
We also had quite a struggle coming up with the name "immutable". Every
term we tried seemed inadequate, until we noticed that we were always
explaining "XXX means the data is immutable", and realized that
"immutable" was what we were after.
Yeah, coming up with terms is hard (I sometimes spend a long time
thinking about the right name just for a function!), but if a term
already has a meaning in your current context, redefining it should
probably be avoided.
Cheers,
Daniel
