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by James Robertson.
Original Post: What's In a Name Anyway?
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Given a start value, and a stop value, and some increment to step by between those two. Now run to your favorite dictionary (real or online), quick, lookup Interval. The start and stop seem fine. But the step seems a bit out of place. If you've got a definition that seems to allow it, I'd love to see it.
You may want to look up Series why you've got your dictionary open. See if it doesn't fit it better. But who cares? For many years, this little incongruity has slipped under my radar, but not tonite. I needed something that models an "interval" from a start to a stop. And try as I might, I haven't hit on a name better than Interval yet. I can't use it really though. Though uber powerful VisualWorks has namespaces, they're still not really using them for the core Blue Book derived class library; or rather, their presence is shortciruited.
Technically, one might say that what I want is a "Set" from number line theory. I even have the open/closed bit. But that class name is used up too.
It amazes me (myself as guilty as the rest) that after 30 years of Smalltalk class library history, we've never bothered to fix this little problem. It's like there's something holy about the Blue Book definitions. Sure, we can do radical rewrites on just about any other parts of the system, but get near a 30 year old, possibly misnamed, feature of the language (inject:into: anyone?) and we can't seem to change these kinds of things. No wonder Kay goes to our conferences and tells us to move on beyond Smalltalk, to think afresh, to burn the diskpack. But then, they didn't fix this in Croquet either, did they?
Maybe one man's pink interval is another man's blue set? Or something like that. Back to WordNet and in search of a word that means Interval.
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