Naming things in Phobos - std.algorithm and writefln

[Bill Baxter]

On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 2:40 PM, Andrei
Alexandrescu<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> 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
>

Maybe introduce a convention like python and bearophile?  "foo" for
eager things and "xfoo" for lazy things is what they use.  At least
when you first see xfoo, you don't automatically assume you know what
that "x" means, and go look it up if you don't know.

--bb