cheers!
Esteban
On 8 May 2018, at 05:15, Richard O'Keefe <raoknz@gmail.com> wrote:
That one's not so good. Not so much because of the acronym, but because it's unclear about what the argument is. A better name would be
#onUndefinedSelector:do:
#gcd:
#lcm:
These come from elementary (primary school in my day) mathematics. They are the standard names.
#rem:
#quo:
These are not acronyms. They are more intelligible than // and \\. But yes,
{floor,ceiling,rounded,truncated}{Quotient,Remainder}:
would be clearer. #quo: and #rem: are sufficiently rare
that it wouldn't hurt if they were longer.
BUT they are in the Blue Book and in the standard.
#ulp
This is indeed an acronym, and it's probably obscure
to many programmers. But practically every paper I have read about floating-point issues uses this; it is
a technical term of art. Spelling it out as #unitOfLeastPrecision as VisualWorks does, and as
both Squeak and Pharo do in their comments, is the
reverse of helpful, because that is not what 'ulp'
stands for. It's Unit in the Last Place. Now there IS
a case for giving #ulp a long name, but that's not it.
There are some subtleties in the definition.
http://www.ens-lyon.fr/LIP/Pub/Rapports/RR/RR2005/RR2005-09.pdf
lists, by my count, five definitions. The first is obsolete,
The fifth is a hybrid of some of the others. It turns out
that I knew less about ULPs than I thought I did.
#ln
#NaperianLogarithm won't help anyone who doesn't
know who Napier was or what a logarithm is. I
suppose #logarithmToBaseE might work.
#theta
That is not an acronym. It is spelled out in full.
Using Greek letters for arbitrary angles goes back
roughly two thousand years. To the Greeks, in fact.
Blame them, not Pharo.
#r
#g
#b
I can think of at least two meanings for each of these, so granted.
following:
#onDNU:do:
#gcd:
#lcm:
#rem:
#quo:
#ulp
#ln
#theta
#r
#g
#b
and others.
Then if you get bored again there are a lot of contractions, too, especially
in Number and subclasses.
Like #abs, #sqrt, #sin, #cos, ...
