On May 28, 2014, at 3:24 PM, Huon Wilson <[email protected]> wrote:
> Changing the names of methods on strings seems very similar how Path does not
> implement Show (except with even stronger motivation, because strings have at
> least 3 sensible interpretations of what the length could be).
I disagree completely.
Path does not implement Show, because of ToStr (and just generally, because
Show can be used to convert to a string representation). This isn't a problem
for most types, but paths are special in that a lot of people think that they
can be represented with strings, and therefore will try to do that. Because
Path does not implement Show it's difficult to incorrectly convert it to a
string (it exposes methods for getting an Option<&str> which is the correct way
to do it).
This is about preventing the user from doing something incorrectly, and forcing
them to use the correct method.
Meanwhile, renaming .len() to .byte_len() doesn't actually prevent anything. It
will just confuse people (and cause a lot of unnecessary typing of "byte_"),
but people will still end up calling the exact same method. They did the same
operation, they just got annoyed in the process.
It's important to note here that in most cases .len() actually is the correct
method to call. This has been discussed before, but basically, string
manipulation needs to use byte indexes (well, code unit indexes) to be at all
efficient, and that's why the character-based methods have special names. This
means that the byte-based methods are the ones we're expecting people to use.
Renaming them doesn't change that fact.
If someone doesn't give any thought to non-ASCII text, putting "byte" in the
method name isn't going to change that. And if they do give thought to
non-ASCII text, leaving "byte" out of the name doesn't cause any issues.
Don't forget that renaming .byte_len() only makes sense if we rename
.slice()/.slice_from()/.slice_to() to
.byte_slice()/.byte_slice_from()/.byte_slice_to(). And besides being extremely
verbose, these methods imply that they return a "byte slice", or a &[u8].
-Kevin
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