[postgis-devel] Function names in PostGIS

[Obe, Regina]

Good points.  I guess I'm in the "What OGC functions can I count on in all dbs I work with?" mode that I completely forgot about the ease of not having to remember ST_ from PGIS_ or something like that and the3 beauty of having all the functions ordered together.
 
Even with that mindset when you compare the strengths and weaknesses of  the non-spatial functionality of each of the various different dbs and slight syntactic differences - you end up tackling the same questions slightly differently anyway.  So the most I can hope for at this point is Knowledge Transfer which I guess makes the whole ST_ non ST_ argument much less important.
 
Thanks,
Regina

________________________________

From: postgis-devel-bounces at postgis.refractions.net on behalf of Paul Ramsey
Sent: Mon 7/21/2008 7:42 PM
To: PostGIS Development Discussion
Subject: Re: [postgis-devel] Function names in PostGIS



Originally we were going to have ST_ for standard functions, SE_ for
esri functions (since that's how they are defined in their API) and
SP_ for postgis-only functions.  But it seemed like it was imposing a
needless extra memorization step for users: not only do they have to
remember the mnemonic for what the function *does* ("startpoint",
"geometryn", etc) they also have to remember what category it fall
into, so they can prefix it correctly.

In the end we just want with ST_, which at least provided us the name
space uniqueness and general syntactic compatibility with
ESRI/DB2/Informix.

P.




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