Re: Flexichain library specification

On Thu, 4 Mar 2004, Robert STRANDH wrote:

Oooh, jummy. Good spec.

> Although we have thought pretty hard about naming, we are open to
> suggestions for improving names of operations, protocols, classes,
> etc.

I hesitate to call the following suggestions -- more like thoughts that
came to mind. In general I'd drop the the "flexi" prefix: call them chains
and cursors. Also, -error postfix in all error condition names might be
good.

flexichain initargs :fill-element

 I'm probably missing something obvious here: why is this argument
 required for non-standard type? Could it not eg. default to first
 element written unless it's explicitly provided?

nb-elements

 What about chain-length? The nb- prefix is... ugly.

flexi-position

 What about chain-out-of-bounds-error or chain-position-error?

delete*

 I'm not sure what to think about this. While I like the insert-op names,
 delete* make me think about cl:delete -- so I'd expect a signature like

  delete* obj chain ..keywords..

 Can't think of alternatives beyond erase, and remove-element, though.

with-editing-operations

 What about with-cursor-operations or with-cursor? I'm also wondering
 would there not be scope for with-chain-operations.

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus