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But a lot of people already know what a "compilation unit" is, or have heard of it, or have some intuition for what it means. So why make up a new word for it?
by dymk 8y ago
But a lot of people already know what a "compilation unit" is, or have heard of it, or have some intuition for what it means.
So why make up a new word for it?
"Rolls off the tongue" is at best an "eh" reason, at worst just an opinion about how a word sounds to some people, which isn't a very strong argument for coming up with new words.
- steveklabnik 8y agoNaming things is a classically hard problem in our field. There’s always room to improve.
- dymk 8y agoSo why is "crate" such an improvement over "compilation unit" that it warrants inventing a new term? Especially when a large number of engineers learning Rust come from a language that uses "compilation unit"?
- yesenadam 8y agoWell, it's 1 syllable instead of 6.
- steveklabnik 8y agoMore come from those that don’t than those that do, these days. Conciseness is a virtue. Additionally, “compilation unit” can also be misleading; for example, incremental recompilation compiles just a portion of a compilation unit, so it’s not really a unit anymore.
- yesenadam 8y agoIt's a stronger argument than I’m getting tired of...