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

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Feb 2, 2006, at 3:43 PM, Frank Barknecht wrote:

> Hallo,
> Hans-Christoph Steiner hat gesagt: // Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>
>> a) one standard is needed
>> b) I think having a "2" is much clearer to read
>
> If one is a l33t h8x0r or listenes to lots of music by
> TheArtistFormerlyKnownAsPrinceThenAsSymbolAndNowPrinceAgain. What
> about [mtwof]?
>
> I'm only half joking: As much as I like to type less as in [t b b]
> changing mtof or dbtorms to 2-ish names doesn't right, if we already
> have them as [mtof] for almost a decade now in Pd alone, not even
> mentioning Max. If there should be one standard, is should be "xtoy".
> (Note that I doubt there has to be such a standard.)

Like I said before, I think that we should not try to be backwards  
compatibile for these libraries.  The old libraries will be in place  
for that reason.  I am not saying that the names MUST change, that can  
stay the same if it makes sense.  This is a chance to shed a lot of  
cruft with relatively little difficulty in the transition.  We should  
not waste this opportunity.

There are precidents to the "2" names:
- MATLAB has: cart2pol, pol2cart, hex2num, str2num, rsf2csf, hsv2rgb,  
etc.
- Pd has: cart2pol, pol2cart, etc.
- There are many commandline utils: pdf2ps, gif2png, etc. etc.

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.

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.   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.

[ftom] is actually a good example, for what Matju pointed out too.   
There are other units for frequency. [hertz->midi] is much clearer.

.hc


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