Aaron Sherman skribis 2005-04-22 10:00 (-0400): > On Fri, 2005-04-22 at 07:46, Juerd wrote: > > Can we together compile a list of accepted abbreviations, so they can be > > consistently applied? > Are you suggesting that these are accepted by the compiler or by us (for > discussion)?
By us. Mostly for the purpose of choosing identifiers (str, and thus substr, not substring), but also for discussion (we talk about subs, not subroutines) and perhaps documentation. See below for further clarification. > You can decide to use whatever you like, but if you're honestly > expecting that people participating in this mailing list are going to > use your favorite abbreviations, you're the kind of person I think we > should have more of in the world: optimists (opmst for short). ;-) No, it's not to change the world. But whatever ends up in the official thing, should be consistent throughout. And for that, we need consensus. Because it can take a long time before people agree, I think we should begin as early as possible. Using identifiers consistently also helps when reading example code. For example, $fh is immediately clear, as are $dbh and $sth. But when someone uses $handle, $connection and $statement for these, it gets a bit harder. Learning something is easiest when in the explanation of one thing, you recognise parts of something you've already seen. And for that, you need consistent documentation, along with consistent usage in the language itself. To provide one example: a few years ago I had a very hard time trying to figure out what 'ary' stood for, simply because in the lots of Perl documentation and code, I had not seen it before. Things that come naturally for experienced programmers can be very intimidating for beginners, and wherever we can, I think we should provide consistency. Of course I'm NOT saying that we should start considering one of regex and regexp wrong. When it comes to reading, both are equally good and recogniseable to everyone subscribed to this mailinglist. But many beginners wonder what the p in regexp stands for! > What's more, I'd rather you didn't w comments with single-letter > abbreviations, as it would make it much harder for me to r. Those are for identifiers, so we don't end up with one function using :r and another using :read. That'd be inconsistent. I should have been clearer when I sent the initial list. I'm not trying to change the world. Sorry about that. Juerd -- http://convolution.nl/maak_juerd_blij.html http://convolution.nl/make_juerd_happy.html http://convolution.nl/gajigu_juerd_n.html
