Wait, what? What is AliasSeq?

Brad Anderson via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Jul 17 19:07:40 PDT 2015


On Saturday, 18 July 2015 at 01:35:03 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> Then you have the confusion about whether you're talking about 
> the replacement of TypeTuple or just aliases in general - 
> especially if verbal conversation. AliasSeq won't be confused 
> with anything.
>
> - Jonathan M Davis

That's the beauty of it and why, years ago when having yet 
another conversation about renaming TypeTuple, I was highly in 
favor of the name Timon (if memory serves) had been using for 
awhile: Seq. The long, long conversations have shown that there's 
no simple combination of words that describes it well so a 
neologism is the best possible option if you want to avoid 
confusion.

You could argue that a new word is harder for beginners but I'd 
argue that using existing words in a way that doesn't actually 
describe it accurately or precisely is far worse. TypeTuple 
confused me greatly as a beginner. In this very NG archive you 
can find me suggesting, to my embarrassment, the name "Type List" 
as a replacement because I thought I understood what it was. The 
flood of disagreements is what finally made me dig in and 
understand it. While I think AliasSeq is better, it's not much 
better and suffers from the unrelated baggage that comes with 
"Alias" so I still think Seq is better than AliasSeq.

(I haven't read any of this thread because I'm exhausted with 
this topic so just ignore me if you guys have already rehashed 
and dismissed Seq. I don't care enough about the outcome anymore 
to fight for it.)


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