On 02-Jun-2000, Ketil Malde <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> 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.
...
> So, commonly used names should be short
I agree. But single character names, as originally suggested in this
thread, are too short; at that point, readability has definitely been
compromised. Only the most pervasive operations would warrant names
so short, and modes for operations like sorting certainly don't fall
into that category.
--
Fergus Henderson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> | "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh> | of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger [EMAIL PROTECTED] | -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
