RE: Best practice for naming of options
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg71493] RE: [mg71473] Best practice for naming of options
- From: "David Park" <djmp at earthlink.net>
- Date: Mon, 20 Nov 2006 18:11:56 -0500 (EST)
Andrew, What is wrong with using a name like MySpaceScaleFunction, or assuming that the option is actually associated with some function Foo, FooScaleFunction? You say that it produces cumbersome option names but if you have a usage message for it one can then use command completion Ctrl-K to bring up the options or routines that start with Foo say. So it is not all that cumbersome, and having longer specific names vastly cuts down on the possibility of conflicts. In my opinion, longer specific names are much better than short ambiguous names. David Park djmp at earthlink.net http://home.earthlink.net/~djmp/ From: Andrew Moylan [mailto:andrew.j.moylan at gmail.com] Hi all, When writing my own functions that use options, I sometimes have a problem where option names become shadowed by other packages that are loaded later. For example, I might want to use an option called ScaleFunction: BeginPackage["MySpace`"]; ScaleFunction::"usage" = "hello"; EndPackage[]; Needs["Graphics`"] Now the name ScaleFunction is shadowed by the option of the same name from the Graphics package: Evaluating ? ScaleFunction gives Graphics`Common`GraphicsCommon`ScaleFunction I can think of two possible solutions to this problem, each with a different problem: (1) I could try to always choose unique names for my options. This produces cumbersome option names and in any case only works until I or someone else writes a package with that option name. (2) I could use _strings_ for option names instead of symbols: Func["ScaleFunction" -> x] instead of Func[ScaleFunction -> x]. I have seen this done sometimes in the built-in Mathematica functions. Unfortunately, with this approach it no longer becomes possible to define usage text for options in the usual way: "ScaleFunction"::usage = "ScaleFunction is an option to Func that ..."; gives the warning Message::name : Message name ScaleFunction::usage is not of the form \ symbol::name or symbol::name::language. Is there a way to get the best of both worlds (define usage strings AND ensure that option names don't become shadowed)? Cheers, Andrew P.S. I observe that the built-in function NSum has an option called NSumTerms. I think this option would be better called Terms. Could it be that the writers of that function faced the same dilemma that I am facing?