Whither Tango?

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

yigal chripun wrote:
> Nick Sabalausky Wrote:
> 
>> "Justin Johansson" <no at spam.com> wrote in message 
>> news:hlop1u$o1m$1 at digitalmars.com...
>>> Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>>> Right, that's what I meant. Use a word starting with "retro-"
>>>> when talking to a english-speaking person, and even if they're
>>>> uneducated, they'll most likely have a good idea what is meant
>>>> by that prefix.
>>> What about persons with English not as a first language?
>>> 
>> I do realize that different native languages can be an issue, but
>> at some point a library has to use *some* language, and the
>> established standard for phobos just happens to be english. If we
>> start banning terms from use in a language or a library on the
>> basis of whether a non-native english speaker is likely to know it,
>> then I suspect (though I admit that I don't know for certain) you'd
>> have to eliminate most of the given language/library because 
>> there's no guarantee non-native speakers would know any of it.
>> 
>> For instance, if there were a russian-langauge library, and I tried
>> to use it, I wouldn't understand any of the words except nyet and
>> da (and I'm not even sure of the correct spellings of those - in
>> either roman or cyrillic). And I would be well aware that I
>> wouldn't be able to assume I knew what something did without a
>> little digging. Of course, I certainly sympathize that this can be
>> a pain for non-native-english-speaking programmers, and that it's
>> an issue native english speaking programmers like me will probably
>>  never be able to truly understand, but until we get to some
>> hypothetcal point in the future where everyone speaks the same
>> language, then, again, at some point there really is no choice but
>> to just assume at least some particular language.
>> 
>> Besides, computer terminology is already, at best, just a bunch of
>> vague meaphors anyway. When I started programing, it took me all of
>> about a minute to learn that "string" had nothing to do with the
>> stuff cloth is made of and stitched together with. And "SCSI"
>> doesn't mean a damn thing at all, even to an english speaker, but I
>> still learned it quickly enough. So even if I wasn't familiar with
>> "retro" as anything other than "old style", I'm sure I still could
>> have gotten used to it very quickly, especially considering that in
>> 99.99% of contexts it's going to be pretty damn clear that it's not
>> being used to refer to bell-bottoms, chome appliances, and
>> flock-of-seagulls haircuts.
>> 
>> 
> 
> This is being silly (and needlessly long). There's no need to collect
> statistics on the level of English of non-native D programmers
> worldwide to decide what name to use for a function.
> 
> It's very simple actually: you want to name a function that reverses
> your range and you have several valid names for it, please choose the
> most common word (the first that comes to mind) which in this case is
> (surprise!) - "reverse". (or any variation that makes sense in this
> particular case, like "reversed")
> 
> simple logic, don't you agree? Any human language has more than one
> way to express oneself. The best way to reach a wide (and
> international) audience is to use the most common phrases - don't go
> all academic on me with Latin or Shakespearean words and don't go
> getho on me with misspelled slang. Is that so much to ask for?

There's no reason to get agitated as nobody is trying to push 
incomprehensible crap on anyone. The problem I was confronted with was:

(a) "reverse" was already taken;

(b) I found "reversed" too subtly different from "reverse". Besides, it 
wasn't clear to me that it was descriptive enough - e.g. some people 
might believe that "reversed" returns a reversed copy of the range;

(c) I was looking for a short name because I presume the function will 
be used often;

(d) In my experience names that are slightly odd but evocative tend to 
stick to memory.

So I chose "retro". What exactly seems to be the problem? If half of 
Phobos' names were weird, I'd say fine, but this discussion latched on 
poor "retro" and "iota" as if posters' lives depended on it. Again: how 
exactly are these two names preventing you from getting work done?


Andrei