Whither Tango?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Rainer Deyke wrote:
> On 2/21/2010 23:07, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> I don't see how iota makes the rest of phobos harder to learn. It's one 
>> poorly named function. All the rest could have brilliant names or absolutely 
>> horrific names, and iota wouldn't really have any impact on them either way. 
> 
> Function names don't exist in isolation.  A consistent naming scheme
> makes all names that use that scheme easier to learn.  Adding an
> inconsistently named function to a set of consistently named functions
> doesn't just make that function harder to learn, but it obscures the
> naming scheme.
> 
> The effect of a single poorly named function may seem insignificant, but
> the cumulative effect of a hundred poorly named function is huge.

I agree. One issue with this thread has been that it has quickly 
devolved in empty assertions of objectivity built on top of personal 
preferences. There's also a lot of rhetoric spent on solid naming 
schemes, but I see as many schemes as proposers.

Mentioning that a naming scheme is good, no matter how eloquently, is 
restating the obvious. The challenge is devising an actual naming scheme 
that catches existing functionality and future functionality. The latter 
is difficult as there is virtually no prior work on D-like ranges so a 
lot of the territory is uncharted. Besides, if we agree that conventions 
like e.g. enclitic "d" or everything that "generates" must start with 
"gen", I don't think that's a huge step forward: (a) whatever comes 
after "gen" must also be agreed on, (b) there are and will be quite a 
few ranges that are only borderline "gen" and I don't want to smother 
future designs, (c) natural language irregularity works against 
consistent enclitics (e.g. "reverse"/"reversed" works great, but 
"split"/"splat" not as great) or existential prefix "is".


Andrei