STYLE

This document describes style conventions for CLEM.
Cyrus Harmon
Sat Dec 16 15:17:39 2006

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Tiered interfaces

It is becoming clear to me that we need something of a tiered set of
interfaces for CLEM. The highest level interface would be what users
of CLEM would be expected to use. It is perhaps worth considering
making a special package for these symbols. Alternatively, we could
export only this layer. However, it's likely that we will want to
export both high- and lower-level symbols, and to keep them separate,
we might consider placing them in multiple packages.

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High-level functions

* m+
* m-

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Destructive vs. non-destructive functions

Currently we have functions like mat-log and mat-log! where mat-log is
the non-destructive version that returns its results in a newly consed
matrix while mat-log! takes the log of the elements of the matrix in
place and returns that matrix.

alternatives:

1. !

mat-log vs. mat-log! (scheme-style)
mat-log vs. nmat-log (lisp-style)
(mat-log :in-place t)
(mat-log :copy nil)