Re: Am I stupid?

[colinr(at)toliman.uio.no (Colin Rosenthal)]

On 11 Jul 2001 21:02:04 GMT, 
William Thompson <thompson@orpheus.nascom.nasa.gov> wrote:

>I've also been occasionally frustrated by this behavior, but I've come to the
>conclusion (a little reluctantly) that it's actually ``A Good Thing''.  In a
>perfect world, we could be sure that the user remembered not to use TIME as an
>abbreviation of TIMESTEP, but you and I know that we don't live in a perfect
>world.
>
>It would be better, as somebody has already suggested, if situations like this
>were caught by the compiler, instead of waiting until somebody actually tried
>to use the TIME keyword.  But the present abbreviation rules should not be
>changed.

However the current situation also allows the related problem I 
described:

pro MySurfacePlot,axiscolor=axiscolor,_extra=e

<do some stuff with colors>
shade_surf,MyData,_extra=e

end

which works perfectly for the first 100 times the user uses it until
the day he trys to set the AX keyword. Thus to use _extra correctly one
must bear in mind all possible valid keywords to all inheriting 
subroutines and ensure that none of programmer-defined keywords
can be abbreviated as any of them. 

-- 
Colin Rosenthal
Astrophysics Institute
University of Oslo