D dropped in favour of C# for PSP emulator

Peter Alexander peter.alexander.au at gmail.com
Fri May 18 06:11:33 PDT 2012


On Thursday, 17 May 2012 at 18:46:11 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Thursday, May 17, 2012 18:00:40 bearophile wrote:
>> Andrei Alexandrescu:
>> > I agree binarySearch is more precise, but I also think it's a
>> > minor issue not worth the cost of changing at this point.
>> > Improving names of things in the standard library is a quest
>> > that could go forever, make everybody happy we're making
>> > progress, and achieve no substantial gain.
>> 
>> Names are very important, they are the fist and most important
>> part of an API, they are the first handle for human programmers
>> and their minds. The amount of care Python development group
>> gives to the choice of names is visible and it makes a 
>> difference
>> in Python usability.
>> Important names can't be chosen by a single person, because
>> single persons have quirks (they overstate how much common a 
>> word
>> or concept is, etc etc). So important names are better chosen 
>> by
>> groups, that allow to average out those quirks.
>> I suggest to stick somewhere inside Phobos a name like
>> "binarySearch".
>
> Yes, names are important, but you'll also never get people to 
> agree on them.
> They're a classic bikeshedding issue. Unless a name is patently 
> bad, if
> changing it is going to break code, then you usually shouldn't 
> change it - not
> when we're talking about a public API (_especially_ when it's 
> the standard
> library of a language). All of the changes that we made to make 
> Phobos'
> function names actually follow Phobos' official naming 
> conventions were
> disruptive enough as it is.
>
> We're really trying to read language and library stability, so 
> breaking
> changes need greater and greater justification for them to be 
> worth it, and
> simply renaming a function generally isn't going to cut it 
> anymore - not
> without a _very_ good reason.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

As far as I'm aware, no one has proposed any breaking changes. 
It's just a new function.




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