[PD-dev] Re: Restructuring of CVS/externals

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:

> I could be convinced to use "_to_", but "to" aka [mtof] is not clear.  
> Another idea is "->".  [hertz->midi], [hsv->rgb].  Actually, I think I
> might like "->" even better.

Precedent for "->" includes Scheme:

(symbol->string 'bang) gives "bang"
(string->symbol "bang") gives bang

> While I am at it, I think that we should try to come up with meaningful
> names. We have plenty of memory these days, even on 10 year old
> computers, we don't need to use short names.

What we don't have plenty of, is screen space, especially when Pd eats it 
horizontally and doesn't let people resize objectboxes to their width of 
choice.

> And its also now pretty clearly established in computer science that
> clear naming saves much more time than short names.  Its all about
> avoiding bugs.

clear names are clearer.
short names are shorter.
however, long names aren't necessarily clearer...

what i said about "_to_" wasn't too serious, but i don't know of a good
alternative. GF has [#rgb_to_yuv] and [#rgb_to_greyscale], but also has 
[#import] which turns anything to a grid, and [#export], which converts a 
grid to a seq of floats, and [#export_list], which converts a grid to a 
list, and [#export_symbol], which converts a grid to a symbol, so i'm not 
all consistent about it.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada