Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Friday, January 21, 2011 06:04:53 spir wrote:
On 01/21/2011 09:44 AM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
Well, entab, I'd argue_does_ follow the naming convention, because entab
would be a verb, albeit a made up one. Certainly, en is a prefix, not
another word, so I think that entab is fine. If that doesn't fly, then
go with enTab, I guess, but I'd argue that entab is a single word and
fine as it is.
I fully agree with you on the linguistic side: "entab" is a single-word
term, just like eg "input" (no-one would suggest "inPut" ;-). But
practically, the decomposition "enTab" helps understanding this
identifier by nicely highlighting "tab", don't you think?
This is even more relevant for foreigners, who have here to guess: (1)
that "entab" is not a 'normal' english single-word term they would just
not know (2) as you say, that en- is a verb-forming prefix in english
one can more or less freely use. Non-trivial.
I'm afraid that I don't agree at all. enTab is hideous and arguably confusing
precisely because en is _not_ a word. I'd start trying to figure out what en was
short for if I saw an enTab function. entab is _far_ clearer. Would you make a
function named enClose? I should hope not. Granted, enclose is actually a word
that you'll find in a dictionary, but en is a normal prefix in English, and trying
to treat it as a word or abbrevation in function names would just be confusing.
- Jonathan M Davis
Even worse -- 'en' _is_ a word! (From typography, with 'en' and 'em').
It could mean a narrow tab, in contrast to an emTab, which would be a
wide tab...
It's unfortunate that the dominant language for programming is the one
with by far the worst spelling.
