Style/Consistency Checks

[neil-glikin]

The general hope here is to make sure that use of IonSim is easy and intuitive for a user, basically matching up with intuitive expectation as best as possible. This is a list of some of my thoughts of items to consider for this. Many of them are questions about how we should handle stuff.

Julian/coding style

• Is it bad form to have different methods defined in different files? (e.g. transitionfrequency, some in ions.jl and some in traps.jl)
• Consistency of argument variable names (I vs ion)
• Ordering of arguments (ion first/last, trap first/last?)
• Use of "set" in functions that end in !
• Function naming: eg stark_shift vs starkshift
• Using functions to modify structs vs directly accessing them
• Outputs for print/show
• When/how errors are thrown/what type of errors vs warnings in various situations
  • Start error messages with capital or lowercase letters?
• Defining a module: within the file or around the include statements for the file?
• Import or export statements first?

Specific to IonSim

• Is Efield_from_pi_time a good name
• Default value of "timescale" should be 1, not 1e-6
• How to make sure that making new ion species is "easy" based off of some template
• Names of things
  • In particular "trap"
• Enforcing m to be rational (where?)
• Should we do intensity instead of E field
• Some functions allow sublevels to be ID'd by an index (Int), but most don't. Should they? Which ones should?
• Functions that involve a transition accepting a tuple as argument vs two different arguments
• Use of ionposition vs position
• Setting of parameters when constructing stuff
  • Be able to set mode Fock state size when creating rather than having to reference and then set mode.N =
• Be able to set constant parameters in a nice way (e.g. L.E returns a number not a function)
• "stark shift" should be named something different so that it's not confusing
• Ability to construct from top down: set up an empty Chamber first, then fill it in

[marwahaha]

goal: making docstrings have consistent style

[neil-glikin]

Just updated first comment

[neil-glikin]

Resources

https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/style-guide/
https://github.com/invenia/BlueStyle

[marwahaha]

https://github.com/domluna/JuliaFormatter.jl (?)

[marwahaha]

from Kristian (see also #95)

It would be nice to create an empty Chamber(), then we consider the trapping potentials for the ions in IonTrap, then add the Laser and IonTrap into the Chamber.

[marwahaha]

Also: Is our convention for phrases:

with underscores, like ion_configuration
with capital letters, like IonConfiguration
with no spacing, like ionconfiguration

[jbroz11]

I've been following ion_configuration for file names. IonConfiguration for structs and ionconfiguration for function names. Sometimes I break the last rule if it is not readable.