On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 09:28:11AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> > That is merely a matter of vocabulary, and if people can cope with such
> > terse 'words' as cp, ln, sed, etc then they can cope with IV and NV.
>
> But the forces are different.
But the principles are the same: you learn them once, they serve you
for the rest of your development time.
> If we require the learning a large
> vocabulary of acronyms to read our code, it becomes inscrutable and we
> might as well forget about open source.
We're not talking about a "large vocabulary". We're talking about *two*.
Two types which are exceptionally commonly used, which you want to
draw attention *away* from.
> For the writer, modern editors have various auto-expansion tools that make
> this much less of a pain than it was 20 years ago.
Conceded. But I'm thinking about the reader, who has to decide what's
important in a statement. A type isn't usually the major focus, so, like
prepositions in language, we keep them short to force the focus back onto
longer things like variable names and functions.
This way lies loop_iterator_variable_i, people.
--
A debugged program is one for which you have not yet found the conditions
that make it fail.
-- Jerry Ogdin
