On Nov 09, 2011, at 02:32 PM, Jim Jewett wrote:
qname seems to be well established for XML. Do you fear that the q doesn't look enough like a prefix, and they won't recognize it as a type of name, or only that they won't know what makes this type of name special?
I think it will be easy to misread __qname__ as __name__ and it won't be obviously clear what the difference between them is.
Python has always valued readability over writing convenience, and I think this is one of Guido's founding brilliant insights: code is read far more often then it is written. And yet, he managed to find elegant ways of expressing code clearly without being overly verbose.
Frankly, I wouldn't know precisely what a "qualified name" is, and I can only guess based on my painful experience with other systems -- of which XML is by far the least ugly. I'm not sure a standard abbreviation makes things any worse. ("Fully Qualified Name" isn't as bad, but clearly runs afoul of succinctness.)
Isn't that a problem with the basic terminology then? If you don't know what a "qualified name" is you probably won't know what a "qname" is, and you definitely won't make that connection. I think that's more reason to find the right terminology and spell it out. -Barry