J2 paper 0.2.1

[Robert Brewer]

Tim Hochberg wrote:
> I agree with Paul that the choice of keyword *is* important. A 
> misleading keyword is worse than cryptic punctuation. The keyword is 
> lying, while the punctuation is merely silent.

That helps clarify nicely.

> I also agree that predef reads poorly. I presume it's meant to imply 
> something like preample or header, but I read it as predefine, which 
> makes me think of some sort of evil forward declaration, not a 
> decorator. It also just feels wrong to me, not that that carries much 
> weight.

You mean decorators *aren't* evil forward declarations? >;)

> Sadly I don't have any better ideas for a keyword. While I'm on the 
> topic, let me point out some of the other keywords mentioned in the 
> proposal that read poorly. "amend", "extend" and "qualify" 
> all share a 
> common flaw that in normal usage the thing being amended/extended/etc 
> should follow the word. Thus the natural reading of:
> 
> amend:
>      foo
> def bar():
>      ...
> 
> is somewhere between "huh?" and "clearly bar is used to amend foo."

Any proposal to winnow down the list is eagerly accepted. :) I admit I
hadn't studied some of those in detail. If there are no disagreements,
I'll remove amend and extend. In addition, I'd like to remove confer,
preamble, preface, and prologue, since nobody has supported them other
than the OP. This would leave:

by, having, helper, meta, per, predef, qualify, through, using, via

The important thing to note is that these are examples of a principle,
not recommendations. I'll be more explicit about that in the doc.

Thanks for your comments!


Robert Brewer
MIS
Amor Ministries
fumanchu at amor.org