A nice way to step into 2012

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

On 12/30/11 12:25 AM, Derek wrote:
> On Fri, 30 Dec 2011 16:22:49 +1100, Don <nospam at nospam.com> wrote:
>
>
>> Some names are better than others. But are they part of the API?
>> That's the issue.
>
> Yes, that is an issue.
>
>> Often, parameter names (such as in sin(x)) are arbitrary and
>> meaningless. This is fundamental: the parameter names are arbitrary in
>> mathematics.
>
> Why is that? I just assumed that it was because mathematicians did a lot
> of repetitive handwriting and thus brevity was important to them.

Well one non-partisan opinion (in any direction) is I've recently played 
with e.g. Python's POpen 
(http://docs.python.org/library/subprocess.html#subprocess.Popen). It's 
quite comfy to be able to say stdout=somefile, stderr=somefile instead 
of enumerating arguments and relying on order to make them sensible.

Using such functions is not math, but is part of writing programs.


Andrei