[Phylobase-devl] Planning the next release of phylobase

[Thibaut Jombart]

Hilmar Lapp wrote:

>On Feb 22, 2008, at 1:25 PM, Ben Bolker wrote:
>
>  
>
>>  Another random question/opinion poll:  what do people think about
>>the names of the tree-walking functions?  should it be
>>getAncestors, getDescendants?  Sons, Daughters? Leaves, branches?
>>    
>>
>
>
>Note that historically accessors in R aren't called 'getWhatever()',  
>but just 'whatever()'. Though feel free to set me straight on that,  
>maybe this trend has been changing more recently as more people adopt  
>S4.
>
>I.e., you simply have ancestors(), descendants(), etc.
>
>Maybe it's also worth looking at some of the clustering packages and  
>see what they use - a hierarchical clustering traversal isn't that  
>different from traversing a tree in many respects.
>
>	-hilmar
>  
>
I would vote for the shortest non-ambiguous accessor, i.e. I would 
prefer stuff() over getStuff().
I guess the methods package used getStuff because stuff was used. For 
instance, "methods" is a funtion, so getMethods was a natural (second?) 
choice.

Thibaut