[getopt-sig] Re: Adopting Optik

[François Pinard]

[Guido van Rossum]

> [...] One of the tasks is to adopt Greg Ward's options parsing module,
> Optik.  I propose to adopt this under the name "options".  Any comments?

My feeling is that Python should much avoid, for a library module, a name
which is likely to be a user variable name.  This would rule out "options".

In my experience so far, the most irritating cases in Python hurding common
words for itself have been `string' and `socket'.  I know that some people
write `s' for a string and would write `o' for options, but this algebraic
style is not ideal.  I find that using real words, like `counter',
`ordinal', `cursor', `index' or such, yields more readable programs.

When one "imports" a module, one has to give up using the module name for
other purposes.  Currently, I think _all_ my callable scripts which handle
options already use `options' for a variable name, so I would prefer that
`options' be left alone.

This is why I think Python should not offer a module named "text" for
example.  As a principle for the future, let simple, common words be
available to users for naming their own variables.

-- 
François Pinard   http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~pinard