Hello Andrei,
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-languag
es-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_fo
ld/ocaml_fold.html
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/caml-list/2004/04/06d65a793fa0503
218c06783be2facbe.en.html
Haskell:
head
last
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/ListDoc/head.h
tml
http://www.cs.chalmers.se/Cs/Grundutb/Kurser/d1pt/d1pta/ListDoc/last.h
tml
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/AbstractSequentialLi
st.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/last. I consider it symmetrical in the context of use, because in this
case head implies "first", not a part of our anatomy.
Another option:
head/stern... but, arguably, this is not perfectly symmetrical.
Otherwise, I just go with whatever gets put in there, I guess. :)
-JJR
