On Thursday, March 08, 2012 20:42:31 H. S. Teoh wrote: > On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 07:07:43PM -0500, Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > On Thursday, March 08, 2012 12:10:07 H. S. Teoh wrote: > > > IMO, making all abbreviations in Phobos consistent would be a big > > > step forward. > > > > You know, people keep saying that the abbreviations are inconsistent, > > but I don't buy that. _What_ abbreviations are inconsistent? > > [...] > > My comment was referring specifically to the pull request that adds > "secs" as an alternative for "seconds". From what Walter said, he seems > to be against any renaming changes, so any existing inconsistencies that > we might find seems likely to be rejected as well. > > But at the end of the day, this *is* just bikeshedding, so perhaps it's > not worth spending so much time and energy on. People will get used to > the quirky names eventually, and life goes on. *shrug*
I think that most of the major issues with inconsistencies have been fixed. Sure, there may be a few left, but the longer that they're there, the more costly it is to fix them. And D is reaching the point where it needs to be stable. Constantly tweaking the standard library just doesn't cut it. I made quite a few changes to try and fix inconsistencies (such as function names which weren't camelcased like they were supposed to be), and that was painful enough, and engendered plenty of complaints in spite of the fact that there were quite a few people arguing for fixing the names to make Phobos consistent. I really don't think that Phobos is really any more quirky or inconsistent than your average standard library. It's not perfect, but it isn't particularly inconsistent either. We'll continue to make improvement to it (primarily by adding new stuff), but it's increasingly costly to make breaking changes. And, on the whole, it's not like what we have is horrible. The biggest problems involve whole modules (which are generally older) which need to be redesigned, and those will happen. But minor stuff like tweaking function names doesn't really buy us enough to be worth it anymore. If a function changes sufficiently to merit a full replacement, then maybe we can change its name and phase out the old one (e.g. if we change the functions in std.string which take patterns to take regexes instead), but changing a name to change a name just isn't worth it when we're trying to provide a serious offering with D and Phobos. We're too far along. - Jonathan M Davis
