Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] ExtLib v0.1o

[Blair Z. <bl...@or...>]

Nicolas Cannasse wrote:
> 
> Okay, I give up, MList was a bad name since the beginning :)
> But I don't think that Mutable_List is good either.
> 
> Perhaps "MutList" ( without underscore ) match both needs :
> 1) descriptive enough
> 2) short enough

Given William's point of code reviews and more people reading a piece
of code than writing it, I would prefer to use the entire word unless
a commonly held shortcut is known to most people, such as Chars for
Characters.

Just so you know, my real preference would be for something like
ListMutable, reversing the order of words.  For example, CPAN has
the following List modules up on CPAN:

Module          Lisp::List      (G/GA/GAAS/perl-lisp-0.05.tar.gz)
Module          List::Compare   (J/JK/JKEENAN/List-Compare-0.15.tar.gz)
Module          List::Intersperse (T/TA/TAYERS/List-Intersperse-1.00.tar.gz)
Module          List::Member    (L/LG/LGODDARD/List-Member-0.02.tar.gz)
Module          List::Permutor  (P/PH/PHOENIX/List-Permutor-0.022.tar.gz)
Module          List::Priority  (U/UD/UDASSIN/List-Priority-0.02.tar.gz)
Module          List::Sliding::Changes (C/CO/CORION/List-Sliding-Changes-0.02.tar.gz)
Module          List::Util      (G/GB/GBARR/Scalar-List-Utils-1.11.tar.gz)
Module          List::Utils     (T/TB/TBONE/List-Utils-0.01.tar.gz)

Here it's pretty easy to see the available list modules that people
could use.  This naming scheme allows easy classification of modules
by there name.  Using the proposed name order would not have as much
order.

So I propose this naming scheme.

1) A module name may consists of one or more words.  The first letter
   of each word is capitalized.  Words are concatenated together with
   no additional characters, such as _.

2) For module names consisting of two or more words, the more general
   word is listed first, followed by words that qualify the first word.

   So ListMutable instead of MutableList.

3) Words making up a name may be shortened if the short version is a
   commonly known shortcut.  Make the name as short as possible but no
   shorter than needed to be easily readable for a code review.

   Determining a shortcut would be up to a vote to see how many people
   could use the shortcut without looking it up.

   Example shortcut: Character -> Char.

So my preferred order of names is (because I don't know how many people
would use Mut for Mutable):

+1.0 ListMutable
+0.8 List_Mutable
+0.6 MutableList
+0.4 Mutable_List
+0.3 ListMut
+0.2 MutList

> I'm happy that we add theses talks, that will help a lot in future problems
> containing modules/functions naming.

Definitely good to get this flat now.

Best,
Blair

-- 
Blair Zajac <bl...@or...>
Plots of your system's performance - http://www.orcaware.com/orca/