[BangPypers] API: Design Matters

[Anand Balachandran Pillai]

Nice post. Talking about APIs, I used to find Win32 APIs as the most
horrible in terms of number of parameters they take and the obscure
name of the params.

I did not know that .NET APIs suffer from similar issues. The Select
API mentioned in the article seems to be very horribly designed and
not well thought of.

Some people think that if they just preserve the arguments and order
of arguments in an API as is the usual accepted form of it, that is
enough. For example this Select(...) API does it since it kind of
retains the "form" of its UNIX select(...) function call (except for
using an integer instead of a structure for the timeout argument,
which is a crime!) . But it is modifying the "semantics" of the API in
terms of how it modifies its arguments. It is not just important to
retain the "form" but also the "semantics" of an API to make it easy
to use.

--Anand

On Jan 1, 2008 10:24 AM, Dorai Thodla <dorai at thodla.com> wrote:
> This may be a good topic for discussion.
>
> Why changing APIs might become a criminal offense - Should the authors of
> lousy APIs be held accountable for their crimes?
>  http://www.acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=488&page=1
>
>
> --
> Dorai Thodla (http://www.thodla.com)
> US: 650-206-2688
>  India: 98408 89258
> _______________________________________________
> BangPypers mailing list
> BangPypers at python.org
> http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/bangpypers
>
>



-- 
-Anand