[moved to cmdstan] Rename print to something more specific

[tmalsburg]

The name print is already taken by other Unix tools. Installing print on Unix-like systems may therefore lead to conflicts. Apart from that, print is not very informative as a name. The issue came up in #630 and I proposed to rename print to stansummary (reminiscent of R's summary function which does something similar for mixed models). @bob-carpenter proposed mcmcprint and stanprint. I like the use of stan as a prefix for all stan-binaries because that is informative and it reduces the probability of naming conflicts with other software packages.

Changing the name would probably require changes in some other places as well: documentation, other software that builds on stan (stan-mode.el for example), etc. Not at least, the users have to relearn the command. Nevertheless, it might make sense to change it.

[bob-carpenter]

I think it makes sense to change it. It was a terrible
name for a command!

Any suggestions for what it should be?

• Bob

On May 22, 2014, at 9:35 AM, Titus von der Malsburg notifications@github.com wrote:

The name print is already taken by other Unix tools. Installing print on Unix-like systems may therefore lead to conflicts. Apart from that, print is not very informative as a name. The issue came up in #630 and I proposed to rename print to stansummary (reminiscent of R's summary function which does something similar for mixed models). @bob-carpenter proposed mcmcprint and stanprint. I like the use stan as a prefix for all stan-binaries because that is informative and it reduces the probability of naming conflicts with other software packages.

Changing the name would probably require changes in some other places as well: documentation, other software that builds on stan (stan-mode.el for example), etc. Not at least, the users have to relearn the command. Nevertheless, it might make sense to change it.

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[betanalpha]

I dislike summary — we’re not summarizing the samples but rather using them
to compute expectations. It’s really the third step of MCMC (after convergence
and then sampling). To that end, maybe something like

mcmc_evaluate
mcmc_compute
mcmc_calc

On May 22, 2014, at 12:34 PM, Bob Carpenter notifications@github.com wrote:

I think it makes sense to change it. It was a terrible
name for a command!

Any suggestions for what it should be?

• Bob

On May 22, 2014, at 9:35 AM, Titus von der Malsburg notifications@github.com wrote:

The name print is already taken by other Unix tools. Installing print on Unix-like systems may therefore lead to conflicts. Apart from that, print is not very informative as a name. The issue came up in #630 and I proposed to rename print to stansummary (reminiscent of R's summary function which does something similar for mixed models). @bob-carpenter proposed mcmcprint and stanprint. I like the use stan as a prefix for all stan-binaries because that is informative and it reduces the probability of naming conflicts with other software packages.

Changing the name would probably require changes in some other places as well: documentation, other software that builds on stan (stan-mode.el for example), etc. Not at least, the users have to relearn the command. Nevertheless, it might make sense to change it.

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[tmalsburg]

Underscores are extremely uncommon in the names of executables. Perhaps it's better to use dashes, e.g., mcmc-evaluate.

[bob-carpenter]

Absolutely --- we should use hyphens as defaults
in file names, but underscores in C++ functions. I've tried
to do that everywhere, but I don't think all of our file naming
is consistent (even by me).

The exception is when we have a file named after a C++ function.
Then I think we should use the underscores. So that'd mean it
should really be:

foo_bar-test.cpp

for our tests if we follow that convention, but given that they're
not exposed, I don't feel the need to change them.

• Bob

On May 22, 2014, at 3:20 PM, Titus von der Malsburg notifications@github.com wrote:

Underscores are extremely uncommon in the names of executables. Perhaps it's better to use dashes, e.g., mcmc-evaluate.

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[syclik]

moved to stan-dev/cmdstan#49.