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ropensci / neotoma

Programmatic R interface to the Neotoma Paleoecological Database.
https://docs.ropensci.org/neotoma
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Should `compile_downloads()` be singular? #123

Closed gavinsimpson closed 9 years ago

gavinsimpson commented 10 years ago

The corresponding function is get_download(), so should compile_downloads() be singular as well?

SimonGoring commented 10 years ago

It makes more sense to me to be plural, since you are merging multiple downloads into a single object. compile_taxa is also plural for the same reason. I think I'd prefer to keep it, unless the consistency seems off.

gavinsimpson commented 10 years ago

To play devils advocate, aren't all the other functions returning one or more things and hence could also work as plural? For consistency I would go with the singular, or I'd rethink this entirely and go for something shorter, like bind() or merge(), or even just write this as a c() S3 method for "download" objects?

SimonGoring commented 10 years ago

the idea of using bind() and merge() are pretty cool. I like bind() a bit more than c(), because I think of c() as being something fairly particular. I'm going to work on some changes to the way compile_downloads() works anyway, so I'll leave it as deprecated and turn it into bind. At the same time I'm going to go back to having a download and download_list object so that it's easier to differentiate. I'm about to make an issue for that.

SimonGoring commented 9 years ago

I think this is now covered elsewhere.