On Wednesday, 15 June 2016 at 03:42:52 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 6/14/2016 8:15 PM, tsbockman wrote:
Do I really need to give it some giant multi-word name?
Something better than 'N'.
`Int`? `Base`?
Whatever it is needs to be short; `BaseIntegralType` is *way* too
long for this and would make many of the signatures painfully
verbose.
Besides which, Phobos uses single-letter names for template
parameter type names
all over the place.
Generally 'T' is used for 'any type'. 'N' has no corresponding
significance.
I have seen all of `S`, `F`, `G`, `X`, `R`, `C`, `A`, and `B`
used as template parameter names in Phobos. Often there is no
particular significance to the letter chosen, but the purpose of
the parameter is obvious from the context, anyway.
Using short template parameter names helps keep D's
already-very-long signatures from growing even longer than they
already are.
Greppability is inddeed a plus, but 'bscal' is needlessly
uninformative. Note that publicly facing names should not be so.
`basic`? `base`?
Again, this needs to be short for readability and usability.
Normally it's not needed at all, but when it is needed (like in
the implementation of `SmartInt` and `SafeInt`), it tends to be
needed *a lot*.
The obvious choices - `value`, `val`, or `raw` - are out because
of the shadowing problem.
I will work on the docs some more.
Thank you.
* SmartInt.toString(sink, fmt)
* SafeInt.toString(sink, fmt)
* checkedint.to()
* IntFlag.toString(sink, fmt)
* IntFlags.toString(sink, fmt)
I see no love for output ranges :-(
I will add support. Someone should update this wiki page with
whatever the current best practice is:
http://wiki.dlang.org/Defining_custom_print_format_specifiers
