Whither Tango?

["Jérôme M. Berger"]

Rainer Deyke wrote:
> 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.
> 
	Plus, "iota" doesn't mean what it does. According to the dictionary
(Collins Cobuild): "An *iota* of something is an extremely small
amount of it. EG I don't feel one iota of guilt... The buyer would
not go one iota higher... You know, I don't think you've changed an
iota." What's the relation with stepping through a range at fixed
intervals? A much better name would be "step": it's the same length
and it says exactly what it means.

		Jerome
-- 
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