[Freeciv-Dev] Re: [PATCH] more small directional cleanups

[Raimar Falke <hawk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2001 at 02:05:35AM -0700, Trent Piepho wrote:
> On Tue, 21 Aug 2001, Raimar Falke wrote:
> > IMHO this all is about positions and not tiles. IMHO it should be
> 
> Yes, I think is_normal_pos and is_real_pos are better names too.  But
> is_real_tile and some other is_x_tile functions already exist, so I thought
> consistency was more important.

IMHO not for long term maintainability.

> > called "normalized" instead of "normal" see the threads for reasons.
> 
> From webster's definition of "normalize":
> 
> 2 : to make normal (as by a transformation of variables)
> 
> So normalized means, "to have been made normal".

From Gautes mail from Sat, 18 Aug 2001 04:15:21 +0200:

-------
Another thing that I'd like to point out is the way that the words
"normal" and "normalised" have been bandied about in a nearly
synonymous manner in this discussion.  I think that's unfortunate.  If
you say "normal", every reasonable person thinks "plain, commonplace;
not possessed of unusual or surprising properties".  As such, anyone
would expect a function named is_normal_tile() to behave as Jason
proposed.  [Incidentally, my macro is called IS_NORM_TILE() and as
such isn't covered by this.]

However, in technical usage when we say that something is
"normalised", we do not mean to say that it is "plain and
unsurprising".  What we mean is that the object has been replaced by
one with a convenient and / or pleasing _representation_, not that the
object itself is necessarily pleasing.  I think that it's a bad idea
to come up with our own defintion of "normalised" which does not match
the use of that word in other technical contexts.
-------

I agree with him.

> If you use normalized instead of normal you are saying that the
> position was, at one time, _not_ normal, and then was made so.  If
> the position was normal all along, then it was never normalized.

So I change it to "is_now_normalized_a_position" but this gets a bit
to long.

        Raimar

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