On Thursday, 17 May 2012 at 18:46:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
On Thursday, May 17, 2012 18:00:40 bearophile wrote:
Andrei Alexandrescu:
> I agree binarySearch is more precise, but I also think it's a
> minor issue not worth the cost of changing at this point.
> Improving names of things in the standard library is a quest
> that could go forever, make everybody happy we're making
> progress, and achieve no substantial gain.
Names are very important, they are the fist and most important
part of an API, they are the first handle for human programmers
and their minds. The amount of care Python development group
gives to the choice of names is visible and it makes a
difference
in Python usability.
Important names can't be chosen by a single person, because
single persons have quirks (they overstate how much common a
word
or concept is, etc etc). So important names are better chosen
by
groups, that allow to average out those quirks.
I suggest to stick somewhere inside Phobos a name like
"binarySearch".
Yes, names are important, but you'll also never get people to
agree on them.
They're a classic bikeshedding issue. Unless a name is patently
bad, if
changing it is going to break code, then you usually shouldn't
change it - not
when we're talking about a public API (_especially_ when it's
the standard
library of a language). All of the changes that we made to make
Phobos'
function names actually follow Phobos' official naming
conventions were
disruptive enough as it is.
We're really trying to read language and library stability, so
breaking
changes need greater and greater justification for them to be
worth it, and
simply renaming a function generally isn't going to cut it
anymore - not
without a _very_ good reason.
- Jonathan M Davis
As far as I'm aware, no one has proposed any breaking changes.
It's just a new function.
