<div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, May 4, 2012 at 4:04 PM, Matthias Felleisen <<a href="mailto:matthias@ccs.neu.edu" target="_blank">matthias@ccs.neu.edu</a>> wrote: <blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"> <div class="im"> On May 3, 2012, at 11:03 PM, Neil Van Dyke wrote: > Matthias Felleisen wrote at 05/03/2012 10:57 PM: >> I don't think Eli is proposing an elimination of the old names but supplementing the code base with new ones. >> >> I am in favor -- Matthias > > Would be good to have a shorter naming convention for all parameters. The "current-" prefix is not short, but it's what I've been using when coding new parameters, because that's the convention. > > Of course, a naming convention is much less important when we have static checking of argument types, but we usually don't. </div>General, off specific topic: Even in the presence of [on-line] type checking, naming conventions make programs readable, as do other conventions. </blockquote><div> If I may add my opinion: They also make programs easier to write. And you've probably already been there several times, but: However, long names make programs both easier and harder to read: many symbols on the screen gives a lot of information to the eye, which then takes more time to see relevant info. As sad as I am to say this, "arr[x] = 3" is read quicker by the eye than "(vector-set! my-integer-array the-current-iterator the-number-three)" (obviously exaggerating): for the reader to understand what the instruction/expression means the former only requires syntactic reading, i.e. quick pattern matching for the mind, whereas the latter requires semantic expansion of the words, although the "!" here is helpful. I'm certainly not advocating very short names though (and I also like Racket's real words, although sometimes it is indeed too long), just stating some debatable thoughts. An interesting idea would be to count the number of times each identifier is used in the sources, and see how many characters would be saved by using different conventions. Laurent </div></div>