On 7/08/2013, at 2:10 PM, damodar kulkarni wrote: > I bet you can find an abundance of C programmers who think that > "strcmp" is an intuitive name for string comparison (rather than compression, > say). > > But at least, 'strcmp' is not a common English language term, to have > acquired some unintentional 'intuition' by being familiar with it even in our > daily life. The Haskell terms, say, 'return' and 'lift', on the other hand, > do have usage in common English, so even a person with _no_ programming > background would have acquired some unintentional 'intuition' by being > familiar with them.
"Lift" is - a brand of soft drink, the thing Americans call an elevator, a thing put in your shoes seem taller, and a free ride, amongst other things. As a verb, it can mean to kick something. To find "lift" intuitive, you have to be familiar with the *mathematical* idiom of "lifting" a value from one space to another via some sort of injection. Fair enough, but this *still* counts as an example of "intuitive = familiar", because this is *not* a sense of "lift" that is familiar to undergraduate and masters computing students unless they have taken rather more mathematics papers than most of them have. If you're familiar with *English* rather than, say, the C family of programming languages, "return" isn't _that_ bad, there is certainly nothing about the word that suggests providing a value. I once tried to propose a C-style 'return' statement to some people who were designing a programming language, before I or they had ever heard of C, and they flatly rejected it. Months later I found out that this was because they were looking for something that did not just resume the caller but also provided a value, and when I protested that that's exactly what 'return' did in the languages I proposed stealing from, they -- being familiar with Fortran -- said that it had never occurred to them that 'return' could have anything to with providing a value. "It is intuitive" has no other discernable meaning than "*I* am familiar with it, or something very much like it." _That's_ the point I want to make. *Whatever* anyone uses for Haskell's "return", many people are bound to find it unintuitive. Choose a name on any grounds but that. _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
