Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Marco Leise" <Marco.Leise at gmx.de> wrote in message 
news:op.waszojl09y6py2 at marco-pc.local...
>
>I have used Java commercially in Eclipse and I have to make a point for the
>combination of IDE and language here. What you really *type* for that is 
>(<cs>
>meaning ctrl+space):
>
>SCVEFW<cs><?><enter> <cs><?><?><?><enter> = new <cs><enter>new
><cs><enter><tab>;<ctrl+1><?><enter><?><end>
>SCVE<cs><?><enter> <cs><?><?><enter> = <cs><?><?><?><enter>.<enter>;
>throw <cs><?><enter>;
>
>resulting in the following code:
>
>try {
>SqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryWrapper 
>sqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryWrapper = new
>SqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryWrapper(new
>SqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactory());
>SqlConstraintViolatedException sqlConstraintViolatedException =
>sqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryWrapper.createSqlConstraintViolatedException
>();
>throw sqlConstraintViolatedException;
>} catch (SqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryWrapperException e) {
>// TODO Auto-generated catch block
>e.printStackTrace();
>} catch (SqlConstraintViolatedExceptionFactoryException e) {
>// TODO Auto-generated catch block
>e.printStackTrace();
>}
>
>That is 72 key strokes instead of 519. So the spelling (as in typing) 
>itself is not a
>problem with camel-case auto-complete, variable name and type based
>parameter guessing.

Yea, but it's still unreadable, though. And even regarding the typing, 
that's really only applicable to Java since Java's the only language which 
pretty much everyone uses with an Eclipse-style IDE. And the only reason why 
everyone does that is because Java's completely unusable without it. Neither 
of those are applicable to D or pretty much *anything* other than Java.

>I tried to use "secs", at least two times. It is one of these cases where a
>minor annoyance adds up until someone eventually starts a rant about it.
>And a lot of people realize that they found the situation odd as well, but 
>not
>an issue. I can see the reasoning behind making templated functions short,
>as in "dur", but it is inconsistent with Duration and almost like foo() and
>bar) :)

My thoughts on "secs vs seconds":

1. I don't feel real strongly either way.

2. I like the suggestion someone had of allowing both "secs" and "seconds". 
Normally I'd be against accepting alternate names (except as a transitional 
phase leading up to the deprecation of one of them), but in this case I 
think it could work without causing too much trouble.

3. Jonathan pointed out that both "secs" and "seconds" are inconsistent with 
other durations. He said that "seconds" was chosen to be consistent with 
"minutes", "hours", etc., and that the rule is sub-second durations use 
"*secs". After thinking about that, I've come to the conclusion that it's 
more important for seconds to be consistent with seconds. Ie, Having "msecs" 
and "seconds" is a more major inconsistency than having "secs" and "minutes" 
because with the former you have two different spellings of the *same* word: 
seconds.