HAIRY (was Re: [Sbcl-devel] making life interesting..)

[William H. N. <wil...@ai...>]

On Sun, Oct 07, 2001 at 02:15:59AM +0100, Daniel Barlow wrote:
> kr...@mo... writes:
> 
> > > 	Things named COMPLEX for non-SIMPLE vectors/arrays
> > >		become HAIRY instead.
> > 
> > i think HAIRY is not very descriptive, and has the wrong connotation.
> > after all, the more complicated data structures provide more utility.
> > their purpose is not to be merely hairy.
> 
> Hmm.  I've never thought of "hair" as implying _unnecessary_ complexity
> 
> > why not call these COMPLICATED ?
> 
> ... though I do tend to consider "complications" as a bad thing.
> 
> > or maybe FULL-FLEDGED, or FULL-FEATURED, or just FULL ?
> > or maybe SOPHISTICATED ?? :-)
> 
> and at least one of the definitions of "sophisticated" is "two-faced",
> I believe.
> 
> I was happy with hairy, to be honest.  And that's despite being
> clean-shaven (most days, anyway) and not owning any Birkenstocks ...

COMPLICATED would be fine, except that HAIRY is much shorter, and
HAIRY- is already fairly widely used in the sources in things like
HAIRY-TYPE and HAIRY-ARGS (from the original CMU CL code) and
HAIRY-DATA-VECTOR-REF (from my earlier work on efficient compilation
of non-SIMPLE array code).

FULL is even shorter than HAIRY but seems less mnemonic to me. The
sources use "full call", and that works for me, but "full array" seems
confusing, partly because "full" as an antonym to "empty" has a higher
profile in this context than "full" as an antonym to "lightweight".

Like Dan, I use "hairy" for as a synonym for "complicated", without
any additional connotation of "unnecessarily". To me, the additional
connotation is "difficult". E.g.
  Proofs of simple statements in number theory can be surprisingly hairy.
(Aside: See _Computability and Unsolvability_, by Davis (available
cheap from Dover Press), Appendix 2, "Hilbert's Tenth Problem is 
Unsolvable", for a very nice example of this, all grounded in
high-school-level mathematics.)

I realize that I disagree with the Jargon File on this:
  1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy."
  2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people,
  high-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible.
But then, in the particular case of ANSI arrays, I think you could
even make a case that the not-SIMPLE array types (bringing in
ADJUSTABLE, FILL-POINTER, and DISPLACED-TO) are annoyingly
complicated..

So I still favor HAIRY, with COMPLICATED in second place. But I can
see that the name isn't perfect, and I do like good names, so I'll try
to leave that substitution until fairly late to give people a chance
to bring up new suggestions or arguments.

-- 
William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...>
FUN n. 1. A function name. 2. An instance of class FUNCTION. 3. A function
designator. 4. An instance of class CLAMBDA. 5. A lambda expression.
6. An instance of class FUNCTIONAL. 7. A function continuation.
-- _The Annotated CMU CL_, W. H. Newman
PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C  B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C