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Misnomers

    Date: Fri, 8 Oct 1993 10:03 EDT
    From: Jeff Morrill <jmorrill@BBN.COM>

    In Clim 2.0 (Allegro beta2):

    It seems as though the function output-record-position
    returns the position relative to the record's parent.  If
    true, then I am surprised this function appears in clim's API.
    I can think of no use for this coordinate system other than
    in the guts of clim.  The function should be called
    output-record-relative-position.

Perhaps so.

    What I wanted is apparently called
    convert-from-relative-to-absolute-coordinates.  This is also
    a misnomer, since I can't give it anything to 'convert'.
    It should have been called output-record-position or
    output-record-absolute-position.

Actually what you want is to add the values returned by
CONVERT-FROM-RELATIVE-TO-ABSOLUTE-COORDINATES to the value returned by
OUTPUT-RECORD-POSITION.

CONVERT-FROM-RELATIVE-TO-ABSOLUTE-COORDINATES could have been named
something better, too.

Both of these functions have their current names for historical reasons.

The spec purposely uses fuzzy language to disguise this, although it
turns out to be a bit too fuzzy.  The reason for the fuzzy language is
that implementations need to be free to use either "absolute" or
"relative" coordinates for output records.  There are good reasons for
choosing either of these.

The User's Guide (both the Franz one and the one I am working on for
Symbolics) are much more clear about this, since the user's guide
necessarily reflects a particular implementation.
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