Re: Why does the meaning (and spelling) of words change?

Philippe Caquant scripsit:

> For ex, the very first reflex of
> any programmer, when creating a file for test, is
> calling it "TOTO". This is kind of a tradition as it
> seems. If you gave a secund one to create, you name it
> "TITI", or "TATA". Which is very unclever, because
> later you don't know any more what this file stands
> for - and sometimes it's just NOT a dummy one.
The anglophone tradition is to use "foo", "bar", and "baz".
See http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/M/metasyntactic-variable.html
for details, also the individual entries linked from there.

People who use any of these names for things of value
deserve to lose.

> Also when naming variables, constants or subroutines
> inside a program: nobody ever learns any rules for
> such nomenclature, everybody just does according to
> the inspiration of the moment, which brings an awful
> mess, of course.
There have been several attempts to bring order out of chaos:
Java uses the rule "classes are nouns, methods are verbs,
interfaces are adjectives (often ending in -able)" for the
most part.

See http://tinyurl.com/ezmr for details on "Hungarian notation", a more
ambitious attempt tailored for C and C++.

> Consonants should be used preferrably to vowels (this
> reminds us the Semitic roots, and yet I'm not a Semit,
> neither talk Hebrew nor Arabic: so it seems that this
> principle could be somehow universal, even for Latin
> languages).
You used to see ads saying "If y cn rd ths y cn gt a gd jb at hi pa".

--
Values of beeta will give rise to dom!          John Cowan
(5th/6th edition 'mv' said this if you tried    http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
to rename '.' or '..' entries; see              jcowan@reutershealth.com
http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/who/dmr/odd.html)

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