Naming things in Phobos - std.algorithm and writefln

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Sergey Gromov wrote:
> Wed, 05 Aug 2009 17:29:11 +1000, Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
>> Michel Fortin wrote:
>>> In std.algorithm, wouldn't it be clearer if "splitter" was called
>>> "splitLazily" or "splitLazy"? "splitter" is a noun, but as a function
>>> shouldn't it be a verb. "makeSplitter" or "toSplitter" perhaps?
>> This is a specious argument.
>>
>> splitter's only purpose is to return an instance of a Splitter struct.
>> You can't call it "splitLazily" or "splitLazy" because that implies that
>> the function is doing work, when it really isn't.
> 
> That's if you know how it works.
> 
> But if you just use these functions, it's not even remotely obvious what
> the difference is, and the difference in naming is so subtle that many
> people will be doomed to forever confuse these functions, myself
> included.  I confuse getopt and getopts shell functions in the same way.
> I simply can't remember which is which.

Very true. If it weren't for backwards compatibility, I'd simply have 
split() do the lazy thing. Then array(split()) would do the eager thing.

Andrei