On Aug 14, 2020, Nathan Sidwell <nat...@acm.org> wrote: > 'exalias' sounds either like a used-to-be alias
*nod* > or it sounds like exa-lias, making me wonder what a 'lia' is, and why > I want 10^18 of them heh >>> I'm sure we can bikeshed the name 'exalias' doesn't seem very mnemonic >>> to me. 'symbol_alias' or something? >> I don't like symbol_alias; that this feature names a symbol is not a >> distinguishing feature from the preexisting alias attribute. > right, I realize this is different to the existing alias. The point was that the existing alias already takes a symbol name. > It's always struck me that the existing semantics are not c++ > friendly. Indeed, avoiding the need for using mangled symbol names to refer to language entities is the very issue I've set out to solve. It helps with aliases in C++ as much as it helps with imports in Ada. > Perhaps alias is not the right name at all. I kind of like the explicit present of "alias" because, well, what we get is an alias, to the point that, if asm aliases aren't available, it won't work. And, if they are, you can use the so-assigned name as an alias target, so it's a good thing if they're typographically related. One could even argue that this new attribute is more deserving of the term alias than the existing one, and that the existing one should be renamed to "aliased_to" or so. But I'm not seriously suggesting us to rename a long-available attribute while assigning uses thereof a different semantics, that would be preposterous. Since you don't seem to have liked 'aka' either, how about 'nickname', or 'nicknamed'? A more convenient name to refer to an entity is exactly what this is about, eh? -- Alexandre Oliva, happy hacker https://FSFLA.org/blogs/lxo/ Free Software Activist GNU Toolchain Engineer
