Whither Tango?

biozic dransic at free.fr
Sun Feb 21 04:17:00 PST 2010


Le 20/02/10 16:17, Nick Sabalausky a écrit :
> "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.

As a non-native english speaker, when I want to use a function I don't 
know the name of, and when I'm browsing the documentation, I must say 
that my heuristic reading overlooks things like "iota" (and perhaps 
"retro" as well) in favor of more descriptive function names.

But what I really miss is a good search engine for the documentation, 
not a function name that is perfectly relevant to my understanding. A 
list of well-chosen keywords/tags associated with every function should 
do the work (more than the present full-text search). Then, when I type 
something like "range generate step", I would get a (preferably small) 
list of functions, among which "iota" -- and I would be statisfied.

Nicolas




More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list