On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 18:16, Matthew Knepley <[email protected]> wrote:

If you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. I think you are exaggerating the difficulty of doing this for simple cases.

The problem is that it's so frequently wrong. I can ask everyone to implement one interface that is always correct, or I can give them two interfaces, one of which is correct 40% of the time (or 95%, it doesn't matter), but then I have to explain under what conditions it is correct, the relative advantages of each interface, and deal with support requests when people don't read that documentation. If the always-correct interface is easy enough to always use, then we should always use it.