[Haskell-cafe] ANN: AC-Vector, AC-Colour and AC-EasyRaster-GTK

[Andrew Coppin]

Paul Johnson wrote:
> Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> Well, no, because now I'm going to have to spend a few hours trying 
>> to find out what CIE is before I can even use that library.
>>
>> I think really it's just aimed at a different problem. It looks like 
>> it's trying to specify actual real-world colours. [It's news to me 
>> that this isn't fundamentally impossible...] I'm only trying to 
>> specify colours on a computer screen. And as we all know, computer 
>> screens aren't calibrated in any way, and the same RGB value looks 
>> different on each display. But then, I'm only trying to write a 
>> fractal generator, so CIE specifications are somewhat overkill here. ;-)
> Your display may not be calibrated, but those used for graphic design 
> certainly are.

Indeed. And if you're in any kind of position where you *care* about 
such things, you should be using color, not AC-Colour. If, however, you 
just want to throw together pretty pictures, AC-Colour is simpler and 
easier. Different libraries for slightly different tasks. ;-)

> On the package naming front: I appreciate your wish to avoid just 
> having another "colour" library.  But "AC_Colour" doesn't help much.  
> "Simple_colour" might be better.

Mmm, yeah. Naming everything with "AC" precludes name clashes and 
doesn't require too much thinking. Coming up with a better name requires 
thinking about what actually makes your package unique. And, of course, 
if another package comes along, that analysis may change. (E.g., I seem 
to recall there's a "newbinary" package which has actually been long 
since superceeded - so not so "new" any more!) If I name my package 
simple-colour, and then somebody else makes an even simpler one... the 
name becomes kind of meaningless. (Admitedly there's not too much danger 
of this happening...)

I just like the idea of having definitely unique, distinctive package 
names. Otherwise I'd have to come up with stuff like geovector and 
trivicolour and so on... Arguably EasyRaster-GTK should have been a 
sufficiently unique name by itself though.