On Fri, Jan 07, 2005 at 09:55:39PM +0100, Juerd wrote: > Stéphane Payrard skribis 2005-01-07 21:23 (+0100): > > > my $s := $subjet; > > > my $c := $complement; > > That's what I wanted to avoid. > > Why? Do you expect to use lots of one letter aliases? > > I think it's one of the most effective ways to kill readability. > > > Juerd >
The clearly expressed motivation was the Huffman principle. So I certainly did not imply to use _lots_ of _one_letter_ aliases. The aliases get to be shorter when they are few and heavily used. In other words, when some vars heavily used in some portion of code, it is a win to locally alias them with shorter names. Because they are few it easy to remember what they denote. The particular optimal lengths of these aliases vary on case by case and is also admittedly a question of taste. Independantly of aliasing, they are global conventions for the use of short names, $i or $j is likely to denote an index. Perl helps further by the use sigil hopefully made consistant in Perl6. Too long names very often result in folded lines, less code visible in a screenful. As a result important structural properties of a program often become invisible. Anyway the particular length of variables names was not the subject of my mail, but a good syntax for aliasing name in signatures. -- stef
