On Friday, 18 July 2014 at 22:37:26 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 7/18/2014 2:14 PM, Brad Anderson wrote:
It's kind of weird that you'd say that because you seem to be
pretty strongly
opinionated about the naming.
It's not just this one, it comes up again and again, always
spawning long debates, and accomplishing next to nothing.
Oftentimes this is true and I share your dread of long debates
(which is why I mentioned bikeshedding in the initial post). This
isn't a "let's make better names for the sake of having nicer
names" post though. This post was to talk about a real, upcoming
problem for which adding a new name for the functions involved is
the only option.
[...]
There is no solution, there is just more discussion and more
debate, and useful work is not getting done.
Yes, there will always be dissenting opinions on naming but I've
spent more time arguing with you about whether or not this is a
waste of time than it took for us to come up with some great
names to use for all the std.string and std.path functions
elsewhere in this thread.
[...]
A naming convention implies a mass renaming of existing lazy
algorithms - or it is not a convention at all.
Lazy algorithms are not a new invention in Phobos. They've been
there since the beginning of range use. setExt is not a
prototype for lazy ranges, we already have them in plenty. It's
a prototype for removing storage allocation from Phobos
functions, making them more composable, etc.
It's not a convention for lazy functions. It's just a discussion
about how to approach the naming problem you discovered. The fact
that the functions are lazy has nothing to do with this. The only
thing the functions being discussed have in common is that they
need alternative but very similar names because of a technical
issue (in an ideal world there would be no need to change the
names at all). That the new functions are to solve the allocation
decision problem or that they are lazy makes no difference here.
It could be any problem in which we can't just use an overload to
address.
Whether "setExtension" or "withExtension" is more intuitive is
caring too much. Calling it "sdjfhalkjshdfjh" is caring too
little.
Well, it's "setExt" versus "withExtension" but I agree we've
wasted too much time on this detail.
