Please vote once and for good: range operations

[Jason House]

Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> It looks like there is endless debate on the naming convention for the
> range operations. 

I had hoped that the endless debate on naming when you first proposed ranges was enough.  You were very good then about trying to find a reasonable compromise.  Obviously, few people got their preferred naming convention, but at least we had a whole committee to decide on the color of the bicycle shed.

I'm not going to vote in a forum like this.  There are online polls that you can do which would do a better job.  Personally, I think it'd be best to do something like "please rate on a scale of 1 to 5 how much you like the following terms representing 'toe' in the current range design"
    (worst)           (best)
toe   1   2   3   4   5
tail   1   2   3   4   5
last  1   2   3   4   5
back 1   2   3   4   5

Something like that would allow doing things like computing the average score of all words.  

> Few saw the obvious bugs in the documentation and
> examples :o).

And here I thought is was better to point out bigger things like questionable API's ;)



> So please let's vote once and for all. I will note that I disagree we
> should ignore what conventions other languages have. Provincialism is
> the appurtenance of the incult. To that end, I looked around at how some
> languages define some primitives.
> 
> LISP:
> car
> last
> http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/they-called-it-lisp-for-a-reason-list-processing.html
> 
> Scheme:
> car
> last
> http://merd.sourceforge.net/pixel/language-study/syntax-across-languages-per-language/Scheme.html
> 
> ML:
> hd
> last
> http://www.standardml.org/Basis/list.html
> 
> Ocaml:
> hd
> no last
> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/libref/List.html
> Apparently Ocaml programmers tend to define their own function called
> "last":
> http://nodens.physics.ox.ac.uk/~mcdonnell/lab/code/code_ocaml/ocaml_fold/ocaml_fold.html
> http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2004/04/06d65a793fa0503218c06783be2facbe.en.html
> 
> Haskell:
> head
> last
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/ListDoc/head.html
> http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/ListDoc/last.html
> 
> C++:
> front
> back
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/158613

What about my favorite from C++ iterators? *



> 
> Scala:
> head
> last
> http://www.scala-lang.org/docu/files/api/scala/List.html
> 
> C#:
> Couldn't find after searching MS's asinine dox for 5 mins.
> 
> Java:
> obj.get(0)
> obj.get(obj.size-1)
> http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.4.2/docs/api/java/util/AbstractSequentialList.html
> 
> Python:
> lst[0]
> lst[len(lst)-1]
> 
> So please let's vote once and for all. No choice will please everybody,
> but I want to settle for something that at least won't displease the
> most vehement ones :o).
> 
> 
> Andrei