On 02/09/2011 09:08 PM, Ary Manzana wrote:
On 2/9/11 3:54 PM, bearophile wrote:
- There is no need to learn to use a function with a weird syntax like iota,
coming from APL. This makes Phobos and learning D a bit simpler.
I would recommend stop using "weird" names for functions. Sorry if this sounds
a little harsh but the only reason I see this function is called "iota" is to
demonstrate knowledge (or to sound cool). But programmers using a language
don't care about whether the other programmer demonstrates knowledge behind a
function name, they just want to get things done, fast.
I mean, if I want to create a range of numbers I would search "range". "iota"
will never, ever come to my mind. D has to be more open to public, not only to
people who programmed in APL, Go or are mathematics freaks. Guess how a range
is called in Ruby? That's right, Range.
Another example: retro. The documentation says "iterates a bidirectional name
backwards". Hm, where does "retro" appear in that text? If I want to iterate it
backwards, or to reverse the order, the first thing I would write is
reverse(range) or backwards(range), "retro" would never come to my mind.
I completely share your points, here.
About iota, while I cannot speak for the English language, in mine (Fr) iota
means more or less <a tiny, irrelevant, difference>, typically used as "it
hasn't (even) changed a iota". I can hardly make any connexion with the sense
of range/interval. No idea why APL designers used this name, but for sure we
should not reproduce their error.
Retro is far less problematic because at least the sense matches ;-) But I
agree an unexpected name is a drawback even if semantically correct: I just
spent some time searching for "reverse" precisely; I knew they func exists but...
The problems is worse in Phobos, because functionality is split across
moduleaccording to a non-obvious scheme (if any) (?). In any other language,
searching for a func operating of foos, you'd just explore the foo module,
right? In Phobos, you need to explore foo, functional, algorithm, bar & baz,
and whatnot. Plus possibly some modules outside std properly speaking (core, C
libs). Very annoying. The logic should be obvious, and at best what most
programmers would expect.
(and no, replies like "you can always alias xxx" are not accepted :-P)
Certainly, because it's /highly/ important for a community of programmers to
share the same "culture". And names are the main support & vehicle for this
culture.
Denis
(For this reason, I stoppped aliasing size_t and size_diff_t to Ordinal and
Cardinal ;-) I use uint everywhere)
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