From: William H. N. <wil...@ai...> - 2001-01-15 23:09:56
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On Mon, Jan 15, 2001 at 04:43:45PM +0000, Daniel Barlow wrote: > William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...> writes: > > > be inclined to stick with :ENV-STRINGS; or at least some other > > other-than-:ENV name, if someone has a better suggestion than > > :ENV-STRINGS. > > Following th style suggestion "there are n ways to abbreviate a name > and only one to spell it out in full", what about :ENVIRONMENT ? OK, > so it's more typing, but that's what symbol completion and dabbrev > support are for. That sounds completely reasonable to me in this particular case, where it's only used a few times. In the general case, IMHO it's good to impose a variant of the style suggestion for some common terms: "there's only one way to write this common term (in this software system) (and it's an abbreviation)." I agree that it's not hard to type out FUNCTION, VARIABLE, LEXICAL-ENVIRONMENT, and so forth, but they're long enough and common enough that they can start to impair the clarity of the program by causing too many lines to wrap; and they're common enough that it's not a great burden to remember their standard abbreviations, as long as the abbreviations are always used. One of the (low-priority, but also easy) items on my to-do list is to go through SBCL standardizing some commonly abbreviated things: FUN, VAR, LEXENV, ARG, INIT, INST(instruction), SEQ, PRED, etc. (Of course, I can't do anything about inconsistencies written into the ANSI standard itself, like CL:MAKE-SEQUENCE vs. CL:COPY-SEQ, but at least I can remove inconsistencies in SBCL's internal names.) -- William Harold Newman <wil...@ai...> software consultant PGP key fingerprint 85 CE 1C BA 79 8D 51 8C B9 25 FB EE E0 C3 E5 7C |