Whither Tango?

[Rainer Deyke]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> This is the third time I'm asking: what is a list of allegedly silly
> names in phobos? Far as I can tell the case against "retro" and "iota"
> is rather tenuous. So what are others? readText? topN? setDifference?
> Talk to me.

"retro" is unusual, but at least I know what it means.  I may not like
it, but I can use it.

"iota" is horrible.  The last ten times I saw "iota", it was a typo of
"itoa".  Like all Greek letters, 'ι' is used as a shorthand for all
kinds of different meanings in different fields of science and
mathematics.  It's a useful shorthand because it's a single letter.
Spelling it out as "iota" wastes space without disambiguating between
all the different possible meanings of 'ι'.

If you're going to go for a single-letter name, "i" is better than
"iota".  It's just as arbitrary, it's just as ambiguous, I have just as
little idea what it means, but it's shorter to write, and you don't need
to know the English names of Greek letters to recognize it.


-- 
Rainer Deyke - rainerd at eldwood.com