On Thu, Sep 20, 2001 at 09:28:11AM -0400, Guido van Rossum wrote:
> But the forces are different. 'cp' and friends must be short because
> you need to type them in an interactive session. The names we're
> talking about here are as important for the *human* reader of the code
> as they are to the compiler. 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 already require the learning of a large vocabulary - the standard C
libraries, for instance. Learning a few more abbreviations does not
strike me as being a hard problem. Especially seeing that you'll be
seeing those abbreviations countless times every day, they'll become
second nature just as malloc and printf are.
The last time someone tried to make programming easy to read, they came
up with COBOL :-)
> For the writer, modern
> editors have various auto-expansion tools that make this much less of
> a pain than it was 20 years ago.
Not everyone chooses to use such an editor.
--
David Cantrell | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.cantrell.org.uk/david
We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity
has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.
-- Richard Dawkins
