Faré wrote:
In that case, maybe instead of trying to take a real English word that
already has a meaning, we should take a short phrase that means exactly what we will do:
DO-DEFAULT-OPERATION-ON-SYSTEM to be shortened to DDO
[I don't like DoS or DDoS for obvious reasons! ;-)]
I think DEFAULT-OP is a better name than BUILD-OP because it says what it means.
While semantically correct, that is quite ugly, and ultimately not very helpful, because it fails to convey intent to someone who is not familiar with ASDF already, and someone who is familiar doesn't need to be reminded such thing.
Well, but consider this hypothetical person who doesn't know what's going to happen and who isn't familiar with ASDF already.
S/he types (asdf:make "foo") and *either* gets foo loaded into his/her lisp image or.... an executable file gets dropped onto his/her disk?
This is going to be confusing no matter *what* word we use.
I can't imagine why we would want to have a command that is "either build or run or do something else with this system."
To be honest, I am not too hung up over this proposed command, simply because I can't imagine myself ever wanting to use it instead of LOAD-SYSTEM, because I don't see the utility of issuing a command that will do something that I don't know and can't predict. Or more accurately, that MIGHT do what I expect and might do something radically different.
It seems like you have two objectives with this build operation:
1. Have a default command. This seems primarily useful for systems that will *not* be loaded, and where the user expects something else to happen. In that case, it seems to me we would be better off NOT making this mostly be an alias to LOAD-SYSTEM. If LOAD-SYSTEM is the right thing, we should just tell ASDF to load the system.
2. Make a *shorter* alias to LOAD-SYSTEM. This seems to me to be a different objective than #1, and I'm not sure trying to achieve both with a single new addition to ASDF is The Right Thing.
Best, r