From: Mathieu Bouchard <matju@...>
Date: 2005-03-31T13:10:15+09:00
Subject: Re: strip and its evil brother strip!


On Tue, 22 Mar 2005, Csaba Henk wrote:
> On 2005-03-22, Mathieu Bouchard <matju@sympatico.ca> wrote:
> > I often use "i" as an abbreviation for instance. I write "ivar" instead of
> > "instance variable". Even the C/Ruby API calls them that way. However, the
> > subtext of such a phrase annoys me. It suggests a binary opposition that
> > asserts the supremacy of the classes over other objects, and effectively
> > even ejects the name "object" in favour of some statement of dependency
> > (it's always about being an instance _of_ something). I'd rather have them
> > called "object variables" or "ovar" but if not then i can accept "ivar" as
> > long as i don't de-abbreviate it.
> Even then, you don't mention using "ieval" :)

GridFlow (my video software) has a C++ macro called IEVAL(). However I
have not used the name "ieval" at the Ruby level yet: it all depends on
how often you use a name. I just don't have that much of a drive to define
a shortcut for instance_eval on the Ruby side.

The naming of things is influenced by how often those names are used.
Frequent names tend to become abbreviated. This is a common phenomenon in
natural languages, therefore it's something that many people do and that
does affect the language. It's a natural occurrence of Huffman/Shannon
compression in nature :-) I recall Larry Wall mentioned Huffman-coding of
function names, and I learned that idea from him.

Unfortunately, one thing I didn't learn from Larry is that most Perl
programmers aren't nearly as smart as Larry, and furthermore, they either
don't read Larry or don't understand him.

> > learnt from the Church of JAVA (tm) that eval is evil and dirty (Ruby has
> [...]
> > (oh, and if you're not following my postmodernist reasonings, i'm sorry.)
> I liked them... Church of Java, sounds as mystic and exciting and
> terrifying as the pirates with their treasures and iron hook hands and
> half eye and wooden legs when I was a child :)

Well, to me, Church of Java sounds more like a cargo-cult in the jungle...

  � Cargo cult is a term for a group of religious movements that occured
  in Melanesia. These Cargo Cults believed that manufactured western
  goods ('cargo') were created by ancestral spirits and intended for
  Melanesian people. [...] �
    -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cargo_cult

_____________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard -=- Montr�al QC Canada -=- http://artengine.ca/matju