Whither Tango?

[KennyTM~]

On Feb 21, 10 01:03, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> yigal chripun wrote:
>> 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?
>
> There's no reason to get agitated as nobody is trying to push
> incomprehensible crap on anyone. The problem I was confronted with was:
>
> (a) "reverse" was already taken;
>

Isn't Array.reverse going to be deprecated?

> (b) I found "reversed" too subtly different from "reverse". Besides, it
> wasn't clear to me that it was descriptive enough - e.g. some people
> might believe that "reversed" returns a reversed copy of the range;
>

I agree the difference is subtle. I propose

   retro   -> reverse
   reverse -> inPlaceReverse

(In ObjC retro will be called reversedRange or rangeByReversingRange :p 
The, well, advantage is no one will confuse what's going on.)

> (c) I was looking for a short name because I presume the function will
> be used often;
>

Out of my previous programs in any languages I've seldom used 
foreach_reverse or its equivalent.

And we all use string very often yet anyone wants to look for a very 
short name e.g. str? I mean, retro is only 3 characters shorter than 
reversed or backward.

> (d) In my experience names that are slightly odd but evocative tend to
> stick to memory.
>
> So I chose "retro". What exactly seems to be the problem? If half of
> Phobos' names were weird, I'd say fine, but this discussion latched on
> poor "retro" and "iota" as if posters' lives depended on it. Again: how
> exactly are these two names preventing you from getting work done?
>
>
> Andrei