Naming things in Phobos - std.algorithm and writefln

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-05 17:40:34 -0400, Andrei Alexandrescu 
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> said:

> 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.

But then I thought D2 was about making things better without worrying 
too much about backward compatibility. I find it dubious that we are 
ready to do a breaking language change about how properties work, but 
when it comes to replacing some standard library functions we can't 
because of backward compatibility. What is the criterion for an 
acceptable breaking changes?


-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/