On 12/30/11 12:25 AM, Derek wrote:
On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:22:49 +1100, Don <nos...@nospam.com> wrote:
Some names are better than others. But are they part of the API?
That's the issue.
Yes, that is an issue.
Often, parameter names (such as in sin(x)) are arbitrary and
meaningless. This is fundamental: the parameter names are arbitrary in
mathematics.
Why is that? I just assumed that it was because mathematicians did a lot
of repetitive handwriting and thus brevity was important to them.
Well one non-partisan opinion (in any direction) is I've recently played
with e.g. Python's POpen
(http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen). It's
quite comfy to be able to say stdout=somefile, stderr=somefile instead
of enumerating arguments and relying on order to make them sensible.
Using such functions is not math, but is part of writing programs.
Andrei
