meshio: inconsistent cell type names

The naming of cell types in meshio is inconsistent. Perhaps we can fix that now.

Abbreviated: quad*, tetra*,

Not abbreviated: all the rest

Needless underscores: hexa_prism, penta_prism

Edit: As pointed out by @tianyikillua, this pretty much follows the VTK convention.

Should we use abbreviations throughout or the full form? Vote now. (Heart ❤️ for abbreviations, rocket 🚀 for full form. Eyes 👀 : Keep what we have)

About this issue

Agreed.

A thought for that future, following the idea that ‘recording information in strings is not Pythonic’: class enum.Enum.

Okay, there is little interest and no actual consensus on the names here, so let’s leave them as they are for now and remember our VTK heritage. 👻

Perhaps we’ll come back to this at some point in the future.

…Yes…but if we pursue further in this direction

we will be reinventing a new finite element data format…
the project name should be changed! It is currently mesh-io and not fem-io.

Note however that currently

isoparametric fields (P1, P2, …) are naturally supported since the number of nodes (including mid-nodes) correspond to that of the DoF’s (scalar functions), as a point_data. Super- and sub-parametric fields no.
DG0 (constant per cell) and DG1 (independently defined at the nodes of each cell) fields are also supported.

But the femtable is for finite elements in the sense of Ciarlet…in meshio we are only interested in their geometrical shapes.