Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, March 09, 2012 09:55:50 deadalnix wrote:
> Le 09/03/2012 05:42, H. S. Teoh a écrit :
> > On Thu, Mar 08, 2012 at 07:07:43PM -0500, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> >> On Thursday, March 08, 2012 12:10:07 H. S. Teoh wrote:
> >>> IMO, making all abbreviations in Phobos consistent would be a big
> >>> step forward.
> >> 
> >> You know, people keep saying that the abbreviations are inconsistent,
> >> but I don't buy that. _What_ abbreviations are inconsistent?
> > 
> > [...]
> > 
> > My comment was referring specifically to the pull request that adds
> > "secs" as an alternative for "seconds". From what Walter said, he seems
> > to be against any renaming changes, so any existing inconsistencies that
> > we might find seems likely to be rejected as well.
> 
> Why it isn't possible to support both ? And miliseconds as well a usecs
> ? This make sense, as long as they are both common.

Because it creates needless aliases. Now you have to remember _both_ of them, 
because they're both going to be used in code. And people reading code will 
wonder what the difference is. It just adds more confusion to the library and 
reduces its cohesiveness and consistency. It works far better to just have the 
one symbol. Isn't that one of the major complaints about PHP? That it has a 
ton of different ways to do the same thing?

Walter and Andrei are very much against having aliases in the library just to 
create different names for the same stuff. And adding more options for the time 
units argument to the templates that use them is basically the same thing. So, 
we're not going to add such aliases. It's not like it's all that hard to learn 
the library, and none of the names are horribly wrong. They just don't happen 
to be the names that you prefer. You have to learn the names of the symbols of 
_any_ library that you use. This is no different.

- Jonathan M Davis