Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> An interactive command line tool and a programming language intended
> for writing non-trivial applications have very different requirements.
> For the former, brevity may well be more important than readability,
> but for the latter it is definitely the other way around.
But verbosity is not the same as readability! "head" is a perfectly
good name for a function that returns the first element of a list,
even though firstElementOf might be more descriptive.
Even names like "car" and "cdr", so preposterous they make a Unix
weenie proud, isn't really a problem, their meaning is about the first
thing you learn about lisp, and you are constantly reminded ever
since.
So, commonly used names should be short (although preferably still to
the point, I'm not lamenting car and cdr here) rather than verbosely
descriptive.
IMHO
-kzm
--
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants
