renamepalooza time

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Thursday 20 January 2011 23:57:39 Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> The following symbols in std.string don't satisfy the Phobos naming
> conventions and need to be renamed:
> 
> LS PS capwords countchars entab expandtabs hexdigits icmp iswhite
> ljustify lowercase maketrans newline octdigits removechars rjustify
> sformat splitlines stripl stripr tolower tolowerInPlace toupper
> toupperInPlace tr whitespace zfill
> 
> Opinions on what to rename?

LS = lineSep
PS = paragraphSep
capwords = capitalizeWords? capWords?
countchars = countChars

Well, entab, I'd argue _does_ follow the naming convention, because entab would 
be a verb, albeit a made up one. Certainly, en is a prefix, not another word, so 
I think that entab is fine. If that doesn't fly, then go with enTab, I guess, but 
I'd argue that entab is a single word and fine as it is.

expandtabs = expandTabs
hexdigits = hexDigits

icmp, I'd actually be tempted to just leave as-is, since it's simple and clear 
and goes well with cmp. But if that's not acceptable, I guess that I'd suggest 
cmpIgnoreCase. It is a tad verbose though. Or I suppose that you could just do 
iCmp.

iswhite = isWS, isWhitespace, or isWhite (I'd probably pick isWS)
ljustify = leftJustify
lowercase = lettersLC
maketrans = makeTransTable

I'd leave newline as is. newline is pretty much used as a single word like that 
in programming when talking about \n, so I'd consider it one word, and so it's 
fine as-is.

octdigits = octDigits
removechars = removeChars
rjustify = rightJustify

sformat = formatInPlace? I'm not sure that I quite get what this function does 
though.

splitlines = splitLines

stripl = stripLeft (though honestly, I kind of like stripl and stripr, and it's 
just dumb to capitalize the last letter)
stripr = stripRight

tolower = toLower
tolowerInPlace = toLowerInPlace
toupper = toUpper
toupperInPlace = toUpperInPlace

tr? The name means nothing to me. I haven't a clue where the name comes from, so 
I can't really give a better version of the same name. As it is, tr seems fine to 
me, particularly since tR just seems stupid. It should probably get a more 
descriptive name though. replaceChars?

Similar to newline, I'd consider whitespace to be one word and just fine as is. 
After all, you don't type new line or white space when talking about newlines or 
whitespace.  newline and whitespace are both whole words with special meaning in 
the world of programming.

zfill is just a weird name. It's slighty better than tr in that it does "fill" in 
the string, but truth be told, without reading the source code, I don't know 
what it really does. I would _expect_ that the justify functions would move 
whatever space was around the string to the left, right, or both depending on 
which justify function you use, but I don't know. And how would that relate to 
filling in the string with 0's? Does it use 0 instead of spaces? The simplest 
would be to just rename it zFill, but unless zfill is a semi-standard/common name 
from other languages or libraries, a more descriptive name might be preferable. 
I have no idea what that would be though.

- Jonathan M Davis