Design #939
Rename Fact to factorial?
Description
I suggest renaming Fact
to factorial
, the same name as used in CoCoALib.
This change is not backward-compatible.
Related issues
History
#1 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago
- Related to Design #868: Der, Bin: why the capital letter? added
#2 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago
In #868 (comment 3) Anna pointed out that the name Fact
could easily be seen as ambiguous (short for factorial
or factor
?)
I do not usually like longer names, but in this case, to avoid the ambiguity, I do not see any good solution (unless we want to implement as postfix operator called !
, but I'm not willing to do that).
The name factorial
is surely clear and unambiguous.
I am thinking of moving Fact
into obsolete.cpkg5
; what do you think?
#3 Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 7 years ago
No need to do any change: the official name is indeed factorial
.
I'd rather keep Fact
working smoothly for some more time.
#4 Updated by John Abbott over 7 years ago
- Related to Support #940: Check all fns in packages work even without BackwardCompatible.cpkg5 added
#5 Updated by John Abbott over 6 years ago
- Status changed from New to In Progress
- % Done changed from 0 to 10
How about making Fact
obsolescent?
#6 Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 6 years ago
- Status changed from In Progress to Feedback
- Target version changed from CoCoA-5.?.? to CoCoA-5.2.2
- % Done changed from 10 to 80
Fact
is in BackwardCompatible.cpkg5, and not in the manual.factorial
is the official name.
Should we close this issue leaving everything as it is?
I see no need to make it obsolescent.
#7 Updated by John Abbott over 6 years ago
- % Done changed from 80 to 90
Why not make Fact
obsolescent?
Surely it is a good idea to encourage users to move away from Fact
to factorial
, isn't it?
#8 Updated by Anna Maria Bigatti over 6 years ago
- Assignee set to John Abbott
John Abbott wrote:
Why not make
Fact
obsolescent?
Surely it is a good idea to encourage users to move away fromFact
tofactorial
, isn't it?
Seem a gratuitous backward-incompatibility, but after all we have already removed it from the manual (and Bin
, similarly).
#9 Updated by John Abbott over 6 years ago
The advantage of moving Fact
(and Factorial
?) to obsolescent.cpkg5 is that users will get a message telling them to update their code (by replacing the fn name with @factorial
). Leaving Fact
and Factorial
in BackwardCompatible.cpkg
produces no such "useful message".
#10 Updated by John Abbott over 6 years ago
- Status changed from Feedback to Closed
- % Done changed from 90 to 100
Moved. Closing.