Please vote once and for good: range operations

[Max Samukha]

On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:26:17 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:

>It looks like there is endless debate on the naming convention for the 
>range operations. Few saw the obvious bugs in the documentation and 
>examples :o).
>
>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
>
>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

head/toe (I'm not a native speaker, so this sounds perfectly good to
me)
head/last (there is not much symmetry in the real world)
front/back 
face/nape