[Bioperl-l] use of no_* to mean 'number_of', negative booleans
Chris Fields
cjfields at illinois.edu
Tue Jun 9 16:08:46 UTC 2009
All,
I've noticed a few methods in bioperl with names like 'no_Foo' that
mean 'number of Foo' (such as SimpleAlign's no_sequences). The
problem I foresee are possible ambiguities, particularly with negative
boolean checks (eg 'no_Foo' could also mean 'this instance contains no
Foo'), something that BioPerl also has with various settings.
I suggest we alias these as num_* to disambiguate that. There's no
easy way to change already in-place flag setting w/o going through a
deprecation cycle, but we can promote using positive booleans where
possible (eg 'is_foo' or 'has_foo' instead of 'no_foo'). We can leave
the older 'no_*' methods as is for the time being and maybe deprecate
them later.
If no one has objections I'll add these in as needed.
chris
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