reverse Dictionary

[Roedy Green]

I do a fair bit of writing. Often a word in on the tip of my tongue,
but I can't think of it. Sometimes partner can guess the word I am
after just from hearing me talk around what I am trying to express.

To use a thesaurus you have to start with a pretty good synonym, which
I don't necessarily have.

I discovered that there is an electronic tool to help, called a
reverse dictionary. It is not a thesaurus. You give it a definition
and it matches it with a number of possible words.

google "reverse dictionary"

I wondered if there was a single word for "four years". I discovered
there was.

I am very big on naming variables and renaming them and renaming them
if ever you can think of a better or more consistent name using the
global rename IDE tools. Accurate, unambiguous names more than
anything else make a program easy to maintain, and come back cold to.
A reverse dictionary could be a tool for finding nice concise words
for concepts to use in variable names.

see http://mindprod.com/jgloss/naming.html
--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.

 

[Dave Searles]

I do a fair bit of writing. Often a word in on the tip of my tongue,
but I can't think of it. Sometimes partner can guess the word I am
after just from hearing me talk around what I am trying to express.

To use a thesaurus you have to start with a pretty good synonym, which
I don't necessarily have.

I discovered that there is an electronic tool to help, called a
reverse dictionary. It is not a thesaurus. You give it a definition
and it matches it with a number of possible words.

google "reverse dictionary"

I wondered if there was a single word for "four years". I discovered
there was.

I am very big on naming variables and renaming them and renaming them
if ever you can think of a better or more consistent name using the
global rename IDE tools. Accurate, unambiguous names more than
anything else make a program easy to maintain, and come back cold to.
A reverse dictionary could be a tool for finding nice concise words
for concepts to use in variable names.

A name obscure enough you have to look it up in a (regular) dictionary
is probably not going to help much; to a maintenance programmer that
doesn't look it up it will probably be no better than xyz123 or
something similar; one who does look these up will spend quite a bit of
time doing that instead of working with the code.

 

[Roedy Green]

A name obscure enough you have to look it up in a (regular) dictionary
is probably not going to help much;

The name ideally is not obscure. But even if it is, if you create a
project glossary and use the term consistently you are a lot better
off than using many different words for the same thing.

Sometimes you have to invent terminology. It works better if the term
as least as a reasonable association with some existing word.

Technical words like chain, cache, pointer, method... started out that
way.

--
Roedy Green Canadian Mind Products
http://mindprod.com

"People think of security as a noun, something you go buy. In reality, it’s an abstract concept like happiness. Openness is unbelievably helpful to security."
~ James Gosling (born: 1955-05-18 age: 54), inventor of Java.