On Mon, Apr 04, 2005 at 10:34:13PM -0400, Andrew Rodland wrote:
: On Monday 04 April 2005 06:34 pm, Juerd wrote:
: > Terrence Brannon skribis 2005-04-04 18:45 (+0000):
: > > So, to avoid confusion with the common understanding of flattening in
: > > Perl, perhaps it should be called spreading or distributing.
: >
: > I agree.
: >
: > Likewise, "slurping" is probably best explained as collecting.
:
: I like this. I'd be tempted to suggest "scatter" / "gather", but that's
: probably a bit opaque to the average reader. How about describing them as
: "expand" / "collect" for a matched pair? That's got a legacy in math, and
: some mathematically-oriented languages.
We chose "slurp" for several good reasons, including the fact that it
isn't currently overloaded N ways from Sunday, and it has a decent
adjectival form that you can talk about parameters with. And if
you're going to make up a new technical term, it doesn't really need
to have any legacy at all, as long as the metaphor works, and the
Huffman coding is right. In fact, sometimes we intentionally go
against existing legacy, like when we named "roles". Sometimes we
go with the legacy, such as with "flatten".
I don't want to discourage people from brainstorming about the
terminology, but you have to recognize that the design team has been
banging its collective head against these issues for years now.
Damian in particular is a stickler for good terminology. So you
*might* offhandedly come up with something better than we've thought
of already, but please realize it's a long shot. Most of these words
were rather firmly lodged into their metastable states even before
the Apocalypses came out--let alone the Exegeses and Synopses--so
you'll have to whack 'em pretty hard to knock any of 'em loose.
Larry
