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Postings from July 2017
On Tue, 11 Jul 2017 00:55:51 -0700, davem wrote: > On Mon, Jul 10, 2017 at 12:45:48PM -0400, Sawyer X wrote: > > Does anyone have any comments on this? Tony, Dave, Zefram? *Karl*? :) > > My opinion on this sort of proposal (and it's an opinion which has gotten > stronger over time (*)) is rarely/never to add a new alias name to an > existing function. > > Alias names just increase the cognitive load. If the old names were > confusing, having more names will just increase the confusion. > > Before, you would have to remember that a particular function foo() is > badly named and doesn't do what you might expect it to do, based solely on > the name. > > Afterwards, you have to remember that that are two functions foo() and > bar(), one is deprecated (which one?), one is badly named (which one?), > but they both do the same thing (Or do they? Sigh. Let's check the > documentation one more time). > > Life is now harder. > > (*) My opinion firmed over AvFILL(). It was a weird name, but I was used to > it. Now I can never remember what the new alias is called (just looked > it up - av_top_index()). In hindsight, I would have voted against adding > av_top_index. I agree with everything you have said. I brought up the same objection when this proposal was first put forward, but I thought I had lost the debate. Well, at least there are two of us now. :-) -- Father Chrysostomos --- via perlbug: queue: perl5 status: open https://rt.perl.org/Ticket/Display.html?id=131685Thread Previous | Thread Next