Earlier quoted context omitted.
> What is the argument against calling it print? No one is suggesting fprintf by the way. Very simple, actually. You know the term REPL, right? It stands for Read-Eval-Print Loop, and originates with Lisp. Actually, every Lisp gives you read, eval and print functions which work closely together. In particular, you expect read to be able to understand what print outputs, because they work in a loop. So print is alread…
> You know the term REPL, right? Yes, and notice how it doesn't stand for Rrepl-Evl-Princ Loop. > There is a good rationale behind those names. No, there is a good rationale for having separate functions, there is no logical rationale for prin1, princ and pprint. Let's take "prin1 produces output suitable for input to read." from the link you provided. Since we are redesigning the language anyway, let's call that eva…
Re: CL21: An experimental project redesigning Common Lisp
#51Well, those functions are pretty much obsolete. No one uses them. They are only in the standard for backwards compatibility (and don't use that as an argument because that is a legitimate reason and those names are easily ignored. they are not taking up a precious name-space). Everyone binds special variables like * print-readably* , * print-circle* , * print-base* which, would you look at that, have nice comprehensible names. Prin1 doesn't have any cognitive load on beginners at all since no code written after 1984 has prin1. I guarantee you that all the names _you_ would find esoteric in Common Lisp have less esoteric equivalents. (car => first, cdr => second etc..) And pprint? well, that's a commonly accepted name even in the python world for pretty-print.
I guess most of the names you complain about is things that you haven't seen in Ruby and aren't familiar with. On the other hand, I can easily argue that in your code snippet above that {|i| ...} looks like garbage to me since every language _I've_ encountered uses lambda(x) = x ... or x, y => ... for something as fundamental as lambda functions. Of course, this would be ridiculous for me to argue since every language has their differences in names and syntax that simply don't matter compared to the actual concepts themselves.