Wait, what? What is AliasSeq?

[Andrei Alexandrescu via Digitalmars-d]

On 7/15/15 10:10 AM, Brian Rogoff wrote:
> On Wednesday, 15 July 2015 at 11:50:43 UTC, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> On 7/15/15 4:29 AM, Mike wrote:
>>> On Wednesday, 15 July 2015 at 07:50:46 UTC, Dicebot wrote:
>>>> Good to see another bad name merged in master ^_^
>>>
>>> Was there a good name suggested that wasn't vetoed by Walter or Andrei?
>>
>> s/good name/name that I like/
>
> What makes a good name good?

One litmus test I have is there's no need to explain the word with 
another word. For a brief time we had in D "invariant" for "immutable". 
We made the change when we figured we needed all too often to explain 
"invariant data means immutable data" to people.

Probably this won't be very useful here because the abstraction we 
describe is rather complex. I'd be happy with something that a dozen of 
folks around here agree isn't bad.

> Some people thought 'splat' sounded ridiculous, i.e., they didn't like
> it, but its use in PHP, Ruby, and other scripting operators, where it's
> really quite similar to its use in D, make it a 'good' candidate IMO. It
> doesn't have numerous alternative meanings in CS, like
> List/Tuple/Sequence, and its coinage is relatively recent, so recent
> that the Wiki entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splat doesn't refer to
> its use as a term in programming yet. It's also short.
>
> I liked 'Seq', because it is a bit ambiguous, unlike 'Tuple', which has
> the same meaning in many popular languages, but by most criteria 'Splat'
> is better.

If there's consensus for splat, I'm fine allowing it. I'm personally not 
very convinced because I'd never heard of the term before and (as I 
described) I was unable to discover with google what it means.


Andrei