Whither Tango?

Andrei Alexandrescu SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org
Sat Feb 20 08:04:36 PST 2010


Rainer Deyke wrote:
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> This is the third time I'm asking: what is a list of allegedly silly
>> names in phobos? Far as I can tell the case against "retro" and "iota"
>> is rather tenuous. So what are others? readText? topN? setDifference?
>> Talk to me.
> 
> "retro" is unusual, but at least I know what it means.  I may not like
> it, but I can use it.
> 
> "iota" is horrible.  The last ten times I saw "iota", it was a typo of
> "itoa".  Like all Greek letters, 'ι' is used as a shorthand for all
> kinds of different meanings in different fields of science and
> mathematics.  It's a useful shorthand because it's a single letter.
> Spelling it out as "iota" wastes space without disambiguating between
> all the different possible meanings of 'ι'.
> 
> If you're going to go for a single-letter name, "i" is better than
> "iota".  It's just as arbitrary, it's just as ambiguous, I have just as
> little idea what it means, but it's shorter to write, and you don't need
> to know the English names of Greek letters to recognize it.

"iota" is already present with the same semantics in 1.25 languages: C++ 
and Go. Anyhow, what's a better name?

Andrei



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