Spelling mistakes!

[skip]

Alan> I've been shouted at for suggesting exactly that!

Maybe Aahz didn't notice my post. The OP sort of seemed like he was pining
for attribute declarations. __slots__ is the closest thing Python has to
them. I don't use them myself (since I've basically avoided new-style
classes so far).

Skip

 

[Aahz]

[[email protected]]

Aside from the other responses (unittests, pychecker/pylint), you might also
consider using __slots__ for new-style classes:

I've been shouted at for suggesting exactly that!

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.python/msg/fa453d925b912917

how-come-aahz-didn't-shout-at-you-ly'yrs,

Because I've been busy. I'd been saving Skip's post for when I had
enough time to do it justice, but your URL saves me the trouble. ;-)

 

[Scott David Daniels]

One thing I've figured out is that using the full spelling
of a word instead of groovy programmer abbreviations makes
it a lot easier to remember the names of things. Of course,
like everything, that can be taken too far, so I still use
things like "bkg_clr" too.

Yeah, it's a real pain to constantly type "breakage_clear" every time.


--Scott David Daniels
(e-mail address removed)

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

[British/American English]

Hah! Canucks r00l! Most of those words look about equally good to us
most of the time. (And it's not because of the beer!) (But our beer
r00lz too.)

And so does "primairy", "secondairy" and similar "frenchifications" of
English words, to some of you ... I'll think twice before agreeing to
maintain software written by people from Montréal again.

(Fortunately, that software was written in a static programming language.)

/Jorgen

 

[Jorgen Grahn]

I do tend to be a bit brief with my names and recognizing an identifier as
an abbreviation don't bother me the way a misspelled word does. Maybe I've
been using Unix systems for too long with their brief command names like mv
and grep.

I like to think of it as everybody else having spent too /little/ time with
Unix systems ;-)

/Jorgen

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

(e-mail address removed) enlightened us with:

I'm one of those people who, for better or worse, is a good speller.
Words just look right or wrong to me and it bothers me when they
look wrong.

Same here. I have to use code that has "childs" instead of
"children"... I also can't stand "then" vs "than" mixups... And what's
up with using Google to check for spelling? I have a dictionary for
that, works a lot better!

Sybren

 

[skip]

Sybren> And what's up with using Google to check for spelling? I have a
Sybren> dictionary for that, works a lot better!

A couple things:

1. It's generally faster than reaching for the dictionary.

2. The hit count for a word and its misspelling gives me some measure of
how the rest of the online English-speaking world thinks that word is
spelled.

3. Some recent words like "podcast" aren't in the now ancient dictionary
on my shelf. Other words have gained new meanings since my
dictionary was published.

Okay, so that's a few things... <wink>

Skip

 

[Terry Hancock]

On Sun, 8 Jan 2006 08:58:48 -0600

Sybren> And what's up with using Google to check for spelling? I have a
Sybren> dictionary for that, works a lot better!

A couple things:

1. It's generally faster than reaching for the
dictionary.

But not faster than use a dict server!
Why not just use (e.g.) kdict? That's what I do. It's got to
be at least as accurate as Google, and much more likely to
give me the right answer.

2. The hit count for a word and its misspelling gives
me some measure of
how the rest of the online English-speaking world
thinks that word is spelled.

This is useful for words that don't really exist.
Or rather, that do exist, but are not documented. ;-)

3. Some recent words like "podcast" aren't in the now
ancient dictionary
on my shelf. Other words have gained new meanings
since my dictionary was published.

Same comment -- Google is good as a backup, but I'd much
rather use a dictionary to look up words than a search
engine. Wikipedia is another good resource for newer words,
brand names, jargon, and slang.

BTW, one of the most common programming spelling errors is
"deprecate" versus "depreciate" -- I wonder how many people
actually realize that both words exist, but have entirely
different meanings?

"deprecate" means "to be declared unworthy or no longer to
be used by an authority" and is pronounced de-pre-KATE,
while "depreciate" means "to go down in financial value" and
is pronounced "de-PRE-she-ATE".

An awful lot of people seem to think that "deprecate" is a
misspelling of "depreciate" and then correct the spelling.
But then, they must have a funny idea of what it means when
a software feature is "deprecated". Maybe they think it's
like the opposite of "appreciate" or something? ("We
don't appreciate your code anymore"). ;-)

I suppose some smart alec is going to argue that "it goes
down in value because an authority declared it unworthy".
Would be about par for the course. ;-)

 

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

BTW, one of the most common programming spelling errors is
"deprecate" versus "depreciate" -- I wonder how many people
actually realize that both words exist, but have entirely
different meanings?

The words overlap in meaning. Both can mean to disparage or
belittle.

Some dictionaries give 'depreciate' as a definition of 'deprecate'.

 

[Robin Becker]

The words overlap in meaning. Both can mean to disparage or
belittle.

Some dictionaries give 'depreciate' as a definition of 'deprecate'.

Well if someone told me my investments were deprecated I'd take that
differently to them being depreciated.

 

[Chris F.A. Johnson]

Well if someone told me my investments were deprecated I'd take that
differently to them being depreciated.

That's why I said "overlap", not that they are the same.

 

[skip]

Terry> But not faster than use a dict server! Why not just use (e.g.)
Terry> kdict?

Maybe because not everybody has it?

% kdict
-bash: kdict: command not found

Skip

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

(e-mail address removed) enlightened us with:

Terry> But not faster than use a dict server! Why not just use (e.g.)
Terry> kdict?

Maybe because not everybody has it?

Lame excuse. If you don't have something but you do want to use it,
you get it. If everybody just used what they had at one point in time,
and never acquired anything new, the world certainly would look
different.

Sybren

 

[Michele Simionato]

The OP sort of seemed like he was pining
for attribute declarations. __slots__ is the closest thing Python has to
them. I don't use them myself (since I've basically avoided new-style
classes so far).

Skip

No, slots are a memory optimization trick and should NOT be used as
declarations.
You can find a few posts of the Martellibot on the subject. I even
wrote a recipe
to tell people who want static declarations how to implement them
without slots:
http://aspn.activestate.com/ASPN/Cookbook/Python/Recipe/252158

Michele Simionato

 

[Michele Simionato]

I like to play devil's advocate here, so I will say that in this case
using automatic testing
will increase your probability of spelling mistakes: I do most of my
spelling mistakes
in the test cases! <0.5 wink>

Michele Simionato

 

[Antoon Pardon]

You're not the first. ;-)


Both "unit tests" and "interfaces" are useful for catching
simple errors like this one. There is a 'unittest' module
in the Python standard library, and 'interface' modules are
available from the Zope 3 project and PyProtocols, both are
good.

I don't think unit tests are that helpfull in this case.
Unit tests help you in finding out there is a bug, they
don't help that much in tracking down a bug.

I for some reason a person is reading over the difference
between sumLongName and someLongName and doesn't notice
the different spelling in his source a unit test won't
be of much help.

 

[Xavier Morel]

I don't think unit tests are that helpful in this case.
Unit tests help you in finding out there is a bug, they
don't help that much in tracking down a bug.

I for some reason a person is reading over the difference
between sumLongName and someLongName and doesn't notice
the different spelling in his source a unit test won't
be of much help.

Since
1- The unit test will obviously fail in this case, telling you in which
code unit the issue is
2- Unit Test favor extremely modular coding with very short increments
(as a somewhat extreme example, Robert Martin gets nervous if his test
suites don't validate the code every 5 minutes, you usually don't write
200 lines and their unit tests in 5 minutes)

We can deduce that unit testing will detect the typo extremely early and
that the field of research will span about 5 to 10 lines, making the
tracking quite easy to perform.

 

[skip]

Terry> But not faster than use a dict server! Why not just use (e.g.)
Terry> kdict?

Sybren> Lame excuse. If you don't have something but you do want to use
Sybren> it, you get it.

I don't think I want it badly enough to figure out how to get it to work on
my Mac. (I'm assuming the "k" prefix implies it's part of KDE.) I'm happy
to continue googling for words I want defined.

Sybren> If everybody just used what they had at one point in time, and
Sybren> never acquired anything new, the world certainly would look
Sybren> different.

I'm not sure what in my response suggested to you that I never install new
software on my computers.

Skip

 

[Sybren Stuvel]

Xavier Morel enlightened us with:

1- The unit test will obviously fail in this case, telling you in
which code unit the issue is

Given the assumption the same mistake hasn't been made in the test as
well.

Sybren

 

[Mike Meyer]

Terry> But not faster than use a dict server! Why not just use (e.g.)
Terry> kdict?


Sybren> Lame excuse. If you don't have something but you do want to use
Sybren> it, you get it.

I don't think I want it badly enough to figure out how to get it to work on
my Mac. (I'm assuming the "k" prefix implies it's part of KDE.) I'm happy
to continue googling for words I want defined.

On the Mac, use Butler. I *can't* say enough good things about Butler
on the Mac - it actually makes the UI bearable.

For this case, I can search any of Google, Wikipedia or Websters
online (both the dictionary and the thesarus) by typing the
appropriate hotkey, the word, and the enter key.

So not only does this make using google for spelling checking faster,
it makes it equally easy to check an online dictionary. Butler comes
preconfigured for either Webster or Dictionary.com, as well as
Wikipedia and some specialty dictionaries, and it's trivial to add a
search on any search engine that does a "GET" query.

<mike