[Numpy-discussion] Don't like the short names like lstsq and irefft (original) (raw)

Alexander Belopolsky alexander.belopolsky at gmail.com
Thu Jun 15 09:15:55 EDT 2006


On 6/15/06, Paul Dubois <pfdubois at gmail.com> wrote:

And yes, I think FFT is a name. (:-> Exception for that.

There are more exceptions that Numeric is not taking advantage of:

equal, less, greater, ... -> eq, lt, gt, ... inverse, generalized_inverse -> inv, pinv

In my view it is more important that code is easy to read rather than easy to write. Interactive users will disagree, but in programming you write once and read/edit forever :).

Again, there is no defense for abbreviating linear_least_squares because it is unlikely to appear in an expression and waste valuable horisontal space. Contracting generalised_inverse is appropriate and numpy does the right thing in this case.

The eig.., svd and cholesky choice of names is unfortunate because three different abbreviation schemes are used: first syllable, acronym and first word. I would say: when in doubt spell it in full.



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