Magritte Validation Error

[Ramon Leon]

> 
> Do you have a better suggestion on how to name it?
> 
> I was looking for a word that does not include 'meta' as a 
> substring (I think it is already used too often in different 
> contexts) and that reads well and tells what it is used for. 
> #description was the best thing I could find.
> 
> In real live I only observed once having an accessor that was 
> called #description and then I could change that together 
> with the author to be something like #summary. I think every 
> method extension sooner or later conflicts with existing software.
> 
> Another thing, probably out-of-topic in this thread, is how 
> you should call accessors, if you have an object referencing 
> an external description, such as MAValidationError. I simply 
> called it #description, even-tough this description does not 
> describe the receiver. I probably should have called it 
> #actualDescription or #targetDescription or 
> #externalDescription or ... I was too lazy at the moment. 
> However this problem stays the same, even if I replace the 
> #description-prefix with any other.

Honestly, maybe it's a culture difference, but damned if I don't have a
description accessor on tons of my domain objects, summary doesn't feel
right to me.  I was just thinking something that's less common than
description, that's just so generic a term and so common for an
accessor.  Even something similar that is more behavioral sounding like
descriptor, or, really, a conversion method like asDescrition or
asDescriptor rather than just description.  It's not really an accessor
anyhow, it's building a description of the object and returning it as a
container, so a conversion method seems reasonable.  Thoughts?