Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[H. S. Teoh]

On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 11:56:58PM +0100, deadalnix wrote:
> Le 08/03/2012 12:55, Steven Schveighoffer a écrit :
[...]
> >The nice thing about dur!"seconds" is that only one module-level
> >symbol is introduced (dur), and it's unlikely to conflict with local
> >symbols
> >
> >It may not be as intuitive, but it's certainly readable, and not too
> >verbose to type.
> >
> >-Steve
> 
> the shorter the symbol, the higher the probability of collision.
> This is math. Definitively an argument in favor of not abbreviating.

That's not the whole story, though. Languages don't use all combinations
of symbols equally. A symbol like 'abc' collides very easily, whereas
'kqx' is much less likely to collide, even though both are the same
length.  (cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf's_law)


T

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