Whither Tango?

[yigal chripun]

Nick Sabalausky Wrote:

> "Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
> news:hlop1u$o1m$1 at digitalmars.com...
> > Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> >> Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-" when 
> >> talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're uneducated, 
> >> they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant by that prefix.
> >
> > What about persons with English not as a first language?
> >
> 
> I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but at some 
> point a library has to use *some* language, and the established standard for 
> phobos just happens to be english. If we start banning terms from use in a 
> language or a library on the basis of whether a non-native english speaker 
> is likely to know it, then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for 
> certain) you'd have to eliminate most of the given language/library because 
> there's no guarantee non-native speakers would know any of it.
> 
> For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried to use 
> it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and da (and I'm not 
> even sure of the correct spellings of those - in either roman or cyrillic). 
> And I would be well aware that I wouldn't be able to assume I knew what 
> something did without a little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize 
> that this can be a pain for non-native-english-speaking programmers, and 
> that it's an issue native english speaking programmers like me will probably 
> never be able to truly understand, but until we get to some hypothetcal 
> point in the future where everyone speaks the same language, then, again, at 
> some point there really is no choice but to just assume at least some 
> particular language.
> 
> Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of vague 
> meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of about a minute 
> to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the stuff cloth is made of and 
> stitched together with. And "SCSI" doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to 
> an english speaker, but I still learned it quickly enough. So even if I 
> wasn't familiar with "retro" as anything other than "old style", I'm sure I 
> still could have gotten used to it very quickly, especially considering that 
> in 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty damn clear that it's not being 
> used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and flock-of-seagulls 
> haircuts.
> 
> 

This is being silly (and needlessly long). 
There's no need to collect statistics on the level of English of non-native D programmers worldwide to decide what name to use for a function. 

It's very simple actually:
you want to name a function that reverses your range and you have several valid names for it, please choose the most common word (the first that comes to mind) which in this case is (surprise!) - "reverse". (or any variation that makes sense in this particular case, like "reversed") 

simple logic, don't you agree? 
Any human language has more than one way to express oneself. The best way to reach a wide (and international) audience is to use the most common phrases - don't go all academic on me with Latin or Shakespearean words and don't go getho on me with misspelled slang. 
Is that so much to ask for?