[ImageJ-devel] Some Naming Issues in imglib2

[Grant B. Harris]

All --

Curtis and I were considering the addition of methods for get/setting 
the display scaling values and this drew our attention to some naming 
issues that we may want to address. There are problems with both 
semantics and style.

-- Semantics of Interval min/max:

In ImgPlus there are several methods names min and max which inherit 
from Interval. Semantically, 'min' and 'max' should really be 'lower' 
and 'upper' (or low/high, or lo/hi), as these fields refer to the bounds 
or endpoints of an interval, whereas minima/maxima refer to the 
smallest/largest values of a set or function.

-- Consistency, or lack thereof, with Accessors, Mutators, Creators…

We have generally used the naming style for accessors and mutators (for 
data encapsulation), but there are many exceptions. While 
getters/setters lengthens the calls, it really clarifies what a method 
does. There are numerous other classes where we are inconsistent in 
naming. For instance, in ImgPlus, get/set is not consistent for 
dimension(), dimensions(), axis(d), axes(), and calibration(d). And 
given that the methods cursor(), factory() and iterator() return newly 
created objects, they should be createCursor(), createFactory() and 
createIterator() respectively. Such changes would probably best be 
propagated back into the ancestors of ImgPlus.

And there are, no doubt, other places where there are naming 
inconsistencies, so if we decide to make changes we should probably run 
a more thorough review.

These seem like significant inconsistencies which we should either fix 
now or decide to live with. What do you all think?

-- Grant & Curtis