Naming of new lazy versions of existing Phobos functions

[Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d]

On Friday, 18 July 2014 at 19:00:56 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
> On 7/18/2014 10:59 AM, Brad Anderson wrote:
>> What do you think?
>
> I'd leaven that proposal with the observation that functions 
> are likely to be lexically sorted by name. Hence, like 
> functions should lexicographically be adjacent to each other.
>
> "setExtension" and "withExtension" will be widely separated, 
> and a user looking for such a function will likely see only one 
> of them and not be aware of the other, which may be a better 
> fit for him.

I really don't see the lexicographic sort order as a big priority 
here. We have cross referencing to show related functions already 
and that does a much better job. The only time lexicographic 
ordering comes into play is with the current naive jump list 
generation which does a terrible job because it lexicographically 
sorts everything in the module regardless of scope so things like 
enum values are scattered throughout the list. ddox does better 
but still the handwritten category jump lists are much, much 
better and don't rely automatic sorting.

> Note that Microsoft often adds the suffix "Ex" when creating a 
> new version of an API function. It works well because the new 
> and old will be sorted right next to each other. I'm not 
> suggesting that these ranges add that particular suffix, just 
> pointing out what others do.

The most obvious suffix would be "Lazy" but I think most of us 
agree we don't want that. When I'm using the Windows API I always 
have to look up if I should be using the regular or the Ex 
version and it's not always obvious until you've read a 
surprising amount on the respective MSDN pages. I seem to recall 
there are now some "ExEx" functions too. I'm not really a fan but 
it is an option.