Re^3: results from pairs combination

[jdporter]

a submodule of Graph—if that terminology makes sense

In some languages, but [un]fortunately not in Perl.

an artifact of working with directed graphics

One method name is as good as another. I originally sought to solve this using undirected graphs, but switched because it looks (lacking any other information) that the input graph is directed. If you treat the graph as undirected, then you might have b,a in the output when the input edge was a,b, and I'd rather have not made the assumption that that would be valid.

What lacks in both methods is a way to get the result in terms of edges rather than vertices. This forced me to do a bit more work to retrieve the relevant original edges from the vertices returned.

[JadeNB]

I think that it is a little misleading to say that one method name is as good as another. Certainly your point about the differences in results is an important one that I hadn't considered; but, absent such peculiarities, I think it's good practice to use a name that's very suggestive to the maintenance programmer of what's going on—no one would name a constructor destroy, even though it could be done; and I think that weakly_connected_components would make a maintainer scratch his or her head over the meaning of 'weakly'. (This is not to say that my suggestion of Algorithms::Graphs::TransitiveClosure, which has one call floyd_warshall to achieve the desired goal, is any better.)

[jdporter]

it's good practice to use a name that's very suggestive to the maintenance programmer of what's going on

Right. But, imho, there is no difference between ajskdl and jaksld — they're both meaningless. When composing this code, there's no way I could have predicted either method name; I had to read the man page to get them. I don't believe that the situation would be significantly different for a maintenance programmer; she would still have to familiarize herself with the documentation of either method to know what it's about. As it was, I had to grok the documentation of dozens of methods from Graph before I had any confidence which one(s) might best suit the need here. It's essentially a question of information content, and that is very much in the mind of the consumer. For someone (such as myself) who doesn't know what "weakly" means in this context, weakly_connected_components means precisely as much as ajskdl_connected_components, which means as much as connected_components. Even an argument about "extra typing" is spurious, since I copy-and-pasted the names.