Arbitrary abbreviations in phobos considered ridiculous

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Ary Manzana" <ary at esperanto.org.ar> wrote in message 
news:jjbg62$2vi3$1 at digitalmars.com...
> On 3/8/12 4:04 PM, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
>> On Thursday, March 08, 2012 06:55:17 Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>>> On Wed, 07 Mar 2012 21:14:34 -0500, Ary Manzana<ary at esperanto.org.ar>
>>>
>>> wrote:
>>>> The problem is not mistaking it with something else. The problem is 
>>>> when
>>>> you want to write it. In Ruby my mind works like this:
>>>>
>>>> Mind: "How would I get a span for 5 seconds?"
>>>> Mind: "Let's try 5.seconds"
>>>> Mind: "Wow, it works!"
>>>>
>>>> I'm trying to remember cases when I just wrote what my mind thought it
>>>> was correct and I was *so* surprised it worked out of the box in Ruby.
>>>> Like writing array.last, and get it to work, instead of
>>>> array[array.length - 1]. But in D, from the docs
>>>> (http://dlang.org/arrays.html )
>>>>
>>>> bar[$-1] // retrieves last element of the array
>>>>
>>>> I read: bar dollar minus one wait what??
>>>
[...]
>>
>> Yeah. I don't understand how anyone can expect to just write code and 
>> have it
>> work without looking anything up.
>
> I just stumbled upon this again in Ruby. I have a time object. I want to 
> know if it's in the past. I wrote:
>
> time.past?
>
> it worked! :-)

I don't like to do such things (especially in dynamic languages). I'd be 
concerned about it *seeming* to work, but not exactly as I expect. Just 
seems to be programming by guesswork and assumptions. I don't trust it.