a naming convention whose time has come

[jrtom]

So a few minutes ago, my boss came over and asked my advice, on behalf of another coworker, for what one should call the second-largest element in a set, given that the largest is called (unsurprisingly) 'max'.

I thought for about a second, and came back with 'penultimax'.

(Another coworker chimed in and pointed out that the third-largest element should be 'antepenultimax', which is one of the reasons why I like working here. It was later observed that everything after that should properly be lumped into 'preantepenultimax', which brought us back to LISP/Scheme's 'car' and 'cdr'...for which those languages already have a convention for combining, which may be just as well in the general case, as admittedly 'penultimaxpreantepenultimax' would be rather more of a mouthful for 'fifth largest' than 'caddddr'. Or maybe 'ca4dr'. :) )

The original requestor, sadly, was not immediately entranced by either 'cadr' (my second suggestion) or 'penultimax' as names, but this is one of those cases in which I don't care whether anyone else thinks I'm funny or not, I _know_ I am. :)

(It turns out (http://www.google.com/search?q=penultimax) that I'm not the first to think of this name, but I still think I rock. I'm just saying.)

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Adopted. Thanks!

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

:)

[lightning-rose.livejournal.com]

I'd probably use 'nextToMax' or some such.

Once, just because I was in charge of such things and could get away with it, I named an error indicating boolean variable, 'allFuckedUp'. :)

Playing it to the max

[fdmts.livejournal.com]

Submax?

MaxOfNotMax?

Winner of the loser pool?

grody to the max

[jrtom.livejournal.com]

MaxOfNotMax is probably the best of those, but SubMax sounds like "cdr" rather than "cadr".

I'm sorry, I'm still too enthralled with my own wit to be easily swayed from "penultimax". :)

[danyeke.livejournal.com]

I still think I rock.

That makes two of us. ;)