[Tutor] Philosphy on method naming in modules?

[Terry Carroll]

I've written a little module, and it's gotten me thinking about the 
philosophy, and maybe even ethics and/or etiquette, of naming methods.

My module, which I call Unihan, provides an interface into the Unicode 
folks' Unihan.txt file.  You can see this file, all 10 meg of it, at 
<http://www.unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/Unihan.txt>.

I use this to basically do lookups in the file, using the various tags 
as keys.  For example, I can take a sequence of 4 hex digits, and find 
out whether any character uses that code, either in Unicode, Big Five, 
or GB, or any of the other encoding methods documented in the Unihan.txt 
file (although I only know a little Chinese, so the encodings for 
Korean, Japanese, etc. are pretty much a mystery to me).

Right now, this is just for me, but I plan to make it available in case 
anyone else would care about it.

So here's the thing: should the developer of a module that's going to be 
publicly shared try to use unique method names, to avoid name collisions 
with other modules?  For example, a method I have that uses Tkinter to 
display the character and its related data is named merely "Display."  

This happens to be a bound method, so isn't the greatest example, but 
suppose it wasn't?  If everyone used a method name like "Display", it'd be 
tough to use more than one of the conflicting modules.

I suppose part of the problem is my approach to using modules.  I almost 
always used "import foo" rather than "from foo import bar, baz" or "from 
foo import *" to import; so I usually end up fully-qualifying the method 
names I use, anyway (the exception being Tkinter, where the code just bogs 
down too much).

So what do you guys think?  For an unbound method to display a thing, 
should you use a nice generic name like "Display", or deliberately alter 
the name to something a little less mnemonic, but less likely to collide 
(say, "UnihanDisplay", "UHDisplay" or some such)?


-- 
Terry Carroll        |   "I say to you that the VCR is to the American
Santa Clara, CA      |   film producer and the American public as the 
carroll at tjc.com      |   Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."  
                     |       Jack Valenti, MPAA President
Modell delendus est  |       Testimony before Congress, 1982