Re: Beginners question: Compound types, how-to?

[Shark8 <onewingedshark@gmail.com>]

On Nov 1, 3:01 pm, Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter....@spam.not.acm.org>
wrote:
>
> >> S/W engineering involves putting in the effort to think of good names for
> >> everything in your code. "_Type" is a kludge to avoid doing that thinking.
>
> > True enough.
>
> Well, if you're going to admit to not being a S/W engineer, then we can ignore
> anything you have to say :)

Well, that is completely ignoring the artistic portion of Computer
Science...
to say that "names must be meaningful" involves a subjective [and
arguably artistic] context
within which to judge the "meaningfulness" thereof.

For example the names [一番の作，　二番の作，　三番の作，四番の作]* likely mean nothing to
you; but to the Japanese
programmer (and quite probably the Chinese one) these are the quite
meaningful identifiers
'first work', 'second work'. 'third work' and 'fourth work' where
"work" is completely analogous to task and
[perhaps] the context is that of a scheduling-system which only needs/
allows for four arbitrary tasks.

Furthermore, as I explained [or tried to], in the case of a
specification which may be used by someone else
then the goal actually IS to be unambiguous and alleviate the
'thinking' required by someone reading/using the code.
We don't want the manager or the junior-programmer to spend five
minutes on trying to understand if it is an object
or a type which you are referring to. In natural language the
distinction doesn't really exist [to my knowledge] and it
is relied upon the context to [implicitly] determine what is meant.

Perhaps, as a way of example we could say that the following verbosity
could provide the proper distinction and allow for
the "proper" naming of both types and variables:

Push( Stack as Variable : in out Stack as Type; Item : in Integer );
which could be used as: Push( Stack => Forth.Data_Stack, Item => 23 );
in a hypothetical implementation/interface of/to a Forth interpreter.