Re: Two wishes for Christmas

Bernd Schoeller wrote:
> I think GOBO always tried to be better than EiffelBase, fixing its
> problems. All it does is to disarm a well-known trap when coding. I cannot
> imagine that people are relying on the fact that 'last_string' is the
> actual read buffer.

My experience working on large Eiffel projects involving many
developers is that people are often using things that we
would have not imaging they would rely on. So I would not be
surprised that somewhere some people rely on the fact that
`last_string' is a buffer (if only for performance reason).
So what I'll try to do in the first place is to try to identify
all usage of `last_string' in the code I have access to in order
to see the real impact of such a change.


> (For my understanding, a DS_ARRAYED_LIST is not an ARRAY, there is no need
> for consistency. I am probably not seeing the problem.)

A stack is not a list. Nevertheless stacks have `put', `item', 'remove'
etc. (instead of `push', `top', `pop'). This is for consistency of
naming across the whole library, even when there is no apparent
relation between classes. Likewise for list (be it arrayed or not)
and array and any other container.

Honestly, I don't see why it is so much of a problem to use `force'
instead of `put' when you want the `force' semantics. It's not as if
the features did not exist. Here it looks more like you don't like
the name `force' for this functionality but would prefer `put'. But
as I said, I tried to keep some naming consistency through out the
library. So your request sounds as if you wanted to be able to use
`push' on stacks. It breaks naming consistency.

-- 
Eric Bezault
mailto:[email protected]
http://www.gobosoft.com

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