[Tutor] Lotka-Volterra Model Simulation Questions

Brett Ritter swiftone at swiftone.org
Sun Sep 30 01:09:41 CEST 2012


On Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 2:16 AM, Alan Gauld <alan.gauld at btinternet.com> wrote:
> As to using short names to keep things on a single line, there is a huge
> body of research in Comp Science that shows that meaningful names outweigh
> single line expressions every time in terms of reliability, comprehension,
> ease of maintenance etc.

With the nod to what exactly is meaningful vs noise, I'm in subjective
agreement.  Can you point to any of the research you mention?  I'd
like to read into to see how my personal experience equates with the
overall study - I might learn something!

One point of curiousity for me: in Perl there was a attempt a decade
ago to promote a change in how hashes (dicts) were named to better
match their usage (that is, rather than having a hash named for the
collection, e.g. %addresses, have your hash named to match the
singular usage: %address_of, which leads to $address_of{$student} ).
No idea if that caught on or not, as I spent a few years trapped in
Java, where the trend is to disguise everything in a mass of Verbed
Nouns.

Googling coughed up this link (
http://infoscience.epfl.ch/record/138586?ln=en&of=HD ), but I'm awash
in results about general discussions of variables in research rather
than studies about programming variable names (my google-fu is weak)

-- 
Brett Ritter / SwiftOne
swiftone at swiftone.org


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