[Chicago] English names

[Randall Baxley]

Here is code snippet from the last lecture summary for the U of Toronto Coursera course.
>>> colour_to_fruit = {}
>>> for fruit in fruit_to_colour:
    # What colour is the fruit?
    colour = fruit_to_colour[fruit]
    if not (colour in colour_to_fruit):
        colour_to_fruit[colour] = [fruit]
    else:
        colour_to_fruit[colour].append(fruit)
Since I am making my little syntax booklet in a 3 X 5 Moleskinnotebook I use col_to_f and that is fine for my own use.  Over the years and working in different shops and at levels from first white board set of thoughts to final documentation and newsletters I have had a lot of various means of commenting used both in programs and in job control languages.  As you can see even the idea of using English words may at times not define the same thing to everyone.  In my mind there may be an algebraic mapping that takes place for col_to_f that translates to colour_to_fruit and that may not be true for others who may later have to take my initial notes orresearch program and make it into production code or maintain and modify that code for system and language changes.  At onepoint in time I sat in a nice big office with a man who was a French educated through grade school Vietnamese fellow who then trained himself through the masters level then took a
 USdoctorate in Math.  He had been working for a couple of weeks to make the program of a physics doctorate from an Ivy Leagueschool into research code to be optimized for the Cray frontended by an MVS system.  At the time what I brought to thetable was an expertise in the system of programs this programwould eventually be dropped into and the command languages for various systems that these would run on.  It became clear that the stopping pointwas not national languages or computer languages but the graphical directions of x, y and z.  The folks from Toronto would still write even that as x, y, and z.  z would be pronounced zed.Thanks for the memories and may we all have fun getting our code working for collaborative efforts with others.Randy, whose name even means different things to different people. 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/chicago/attachments/20121116/35249d4f/attachment.html>