On Wed, 28 Jan 2009 16:26:17 -0800, Andrei Alexandrescu <seewebsiteforem...@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
