Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[H. S. Teoh]

On Wed, Mar 07, 2012 at 01:24:03PM -0500, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
[...]
> My thoughts on "secs vs seconds":
> 
> 1. I don't feel real strongly either way.
> 
> 2. I like the suggestion someone had of allowing both "secs" and
> "seconds".  Normally I'd be against accepting alternate names (except
> as a transitional phase leading up to the deprecation of one of them),
> but in this case I think it could work without causing too much
> trouble.
> 
> 3. Jonathan pointed out that both "secs" and "seconds" are
> inconsistent with other durations. He said that "seconds" was chosen
> to be consistent with "minutes", "hours", etc., and that the rule is
> sub-second durations use "*secs". After thinking about that, I've come
> to the conclusion that it's more important for seconds to be
> consistent with seconds. Ie, Having "msecs" and "seconds" is a more
> major inconsistency than having "secs" and "minutes" because with the
> former you have two different spellings of the *same* word: seconds.
[...]

I agree. This is one example of what I said about consistency. If we're
going to abbreviate "seconds" to "secs" at all, we should abbreviate
*all* instances to "secs".

While I understand Jonathan's explanation of the rule of durations
longer/shorter than seconds, that's not something that someone
unfamiliar with the system would expect. Picking seconds as the boundary
between spelling it "seconds" vs. "secs" seems arbitrary. Why not pick
hours as the dividing line instead? Make it years, days, hours, mins,
secs, msecs, ...  instead. Or why not days, since days can't be
reasonably abbreviated?  Years, days, hrs, mins, secs, msecs, ....

I think the right thing to do is to consistently abbreviate seconds as
secs. As a compromise with the current state of affairs, alias "seconds"
to "secs", as Nick suggests above.


T

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