Proposal for std.path replacement

[Nick Sabalausky]

"spir" <denis.spir at gmail.com> wrote in message 
news:mailman.2175.1299248868.4748.digitalmars-d at puremagic.com...
> On 03/04/2011 12:01 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>>> I have a preference for the longer names, but not a very strong one. 
>>> I'm
>>> >  not going to oppose the changes if others agree with you.
>> I definitely like descriptive names, and my function names are often 
>> long, but I
>> do tend to find that long names can get annoying - especially if you have 
>> to use
>> them often. So, I think that you should generally choose shorter names as 
>> long
>> as they are appropriately descriptive. A name like stripExt is clear 
>> enough -
>> especially in context - to work quite well, so the longer name 
>> stripExtension is
>> unnecessary, whereas ext may not be clear enough and the full name 
>> extension
>
> I tend to agree with you.
> Especially on the point that (very) common names can be shorter. On one 
> hand, they are more easily inderstood & memorised precisely because they 
> are common; on the other, you get the maximum benefit in terms of 
> user-friendliness for the same reason (that they are common). Abbreviating 
> more rare names makes the code harder to understand for (very) few 
> benefit.
> Now, is stripExt/stripExtension that common? I would say no. The day you 
> need it, you may have to write it several times because you're dealing 
> with a piece of code that copes with file names. Right, then, you may like 
> it be shorter. But this "pain" will soon stop; and maybe, probably?, you 
> won't have again to write that name for weeks or months. What do you 
> think?
>
> Another factor is the inherent clarity of the abbreviation. 'ext' can 
> certainly be interpreted in various ways. As you say, context helps much; 
> but it's a decisive argument for languages in which context prefixes, such 
> as module names, are commonly used: eg "path.stripExt(fileName)". But this 
> is not common practice in D, thus func names need be more precise, I 
> guess.
>

Maybe it's just me having been knee-deep into the Win/MS-DOS world since 
well into the 8.3 days, but "ext" always instinctively means "file 
extension" to me. Of course, like I said, I happy with "extension" too, but 
just FWIW.