Re: Type naming conventions: Any_Foo

[Optikos <optikos@verizon.net>]

On Thursday, December 5, 2019 at 4:51:36 AM UTC-6, AdaMagica wrote:
> Of all of these schemes, my favorite is
> Package Foos

In this or any other naming convention that utilizes plural, the convention must eventually inform what to do (in English) with nouns that
a) are the same in both plural & singular (e.g., fish, deer); and
b) have no plural, such as noncount/mass-count nouns (e.g., furniture, software); and
c) the plural (if it exists) most likely refers to the type-of not the (microscopic) instance-of due to using measure words for referring to the (microscopic) instances of (e.g., flour [as dust] versus flours as type of flour; [grain of] sand versus sands as type of sand; [kernel of] rice/corn versus rices as types of rice/corn]); and
d) the plethora of measure words, especially for demarcating plural of individuals or of groups (e.g., lions as multiple individuals versus pride of lions as a cohesive group versus prides of lions as multiple of multiple); and
e) nonconforming foreign-import plurals (e.g., courts marshal; attorneys general); and
f) acronyms & initialisms, especially when the pluralized noun in the acronym or initialism is not the final word (e.g., should certificates of deposit be CDs and attorneys general be AGs since it is not certificate of deposits and attorney generals?); and
g) Latin-derived plurals versus English-derived plurals (e.g., radii versus radiuses both being perfectly correct & widely accepted in English).

(Of which f is the most pedantic in a case-insensitive language such as Ada, because usually the nonagreement is DVDs versus Dvds and CDs versus Cds, not CsD, and AGs versus Ags, not AsG.)

Given all that opportunity for debate, there is some wisdom in rejecting English plurals per se to instead:
A) always add -s when the singular phonetically ends in not-s and always add -es when the singular phonetically ends in -s, as in mouse->mouses, ax->axes, axis->axises.
or
B) always use the same affix as prefix or suffix, as in Pkg_Foo or Foo_Pkg.

Option B makes scripting automation especially easy in the build environment or in source-code generation or refactoring, so that the scripting need not have AI-esque knowledge of English (or an artificial-artificial intelligence of a giant human-curated look-up table).