Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Friday, March 09, 2012 10:28:12 deadalnix wrote:
> Le 09/03/2012 10:07, Jonathan M Davis a écrit :
> > 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
> 
> This is not alias. This is about accepting template parameters. The
> actual isn't very consistent anyway (seconds, but usecs ?).

It amounts to the same thing, and core.time and std.datetime are as consistent 
as they're going to get. seconds are _always_ seconds, and _no_ units greater 
than seconds are ever abbreviated. Only the sub-second units are abbreviated. 
And they're abbreviated only because they would have been way too long 
otherwise. And making seconds secs would create even _more_ inconsistencies. 
Just read the discusion in the pull request:

https://github.com/D-Programming-Language/druntime/pull/173

- Jonathan M Davis