- From: Dimitre Novatchev <dnovatchev@yahoo.com>
- Date: Fri, 5 Dec 2003 11:41:00 -0800 (PST)
- To: "Kay, Michael" <Michael.Kay@softwareag.com>, Ashok Malhotra <ashokma@microsoft.com>, public-qt-comments@w3.org
> I don't think that naming decisions can be made by any democratic > process; on the contrary, it's probably true that the more people you > involve, the harder it is to achieve stylistic consistency. The names > will never please everyone. Neither of the names "exists" or "empty" is > perfect, because they both have other possible meanings (empty, in > particular, is tricky because people might think that empty($E) tests > whether $E is an element with no children). We felt in this case that > brevity is more important than trying to capture the entire semantics of > the function in its name. We didn't feel that the names you suggested > were significantly more likely to be intuitive to users than the > existing names. I am not insisting on changing the names, but was interested to understand the logic behind these names. I also thought that the fact that the following expression is an identity (the constant true()): not(empty($seq)) = exists($seq) would be easier to understand with these names: not(empty($seq)) = non-empty($seq) and the user would have to remember one name less. Thanks to your clarification I understand that brevity was preferred over logic in this case. Thank you, Dimitre Novatchev. __________________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Received on Friday, 5 December 2003 14:41:02 UTC