Shouldn't have IsAlpha() from std.uni has a different name to avoid confusing from std.ascii?

[MacAsm via Digitalmars-d]

I'm trying to write in D rather than C++ an application where I 
do need to write a small parsing library.


These two modules part of D standard library (no idea if it's D 
term to call a library/module part of the language itself) has 
the same name. Depeding if imported is either std.uni or 
std.ascii it does have exactly the opposite behavior. Not sure of 
it is only for me, but as part of the standard library I see this 
as a negative point and I think it would be better if one(the one 
from IsAlpha(), my suggestion) of is ranamed.


Any thoughts? I don't know if I'm missing something but two 
functions (and not methods) with same name is very bad.

Re: Shouldn't have IsAlpha() from std.uni has a different name to avoid confusing from std.ascii?

[ketmar via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 15:27:46 +
MacAsm via Digitalmars-d  wrote:

> Any thoughts? I don't know if I'm missing something but two 
> functions (and not methods) with same name is very bad.
they doing much the same, but for different character sets. two
different names will just confuse users.

you can use fully qualified names and/or local imports to use exactly
what you want. something like:

  void myFunc (char ch) {
import std.ascii;
if (std.ascii.isAlpha(ch)) ...
  }

local imports rocks! ;-)


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Re: Shouldn't have IsAlpha() from std.uni has a different name to avoid confusing from std.ascii?

[Jonathan M Davis via Digitalmars-d]

On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 18:36:30 +0300
ketmar via Digitalmars-d  wrote:

> On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 15:27:46 +
> MacAsm via Digitalmars-d  wrote:
>
> > Any thoughts? I don't know if I'm missing something but two
> > functions (and not methods) with same name is very bad.
> they doing much the same, but for different character sets. two
> different names will just confuse users.
>
> you can use fully qualified names and/or local imports to use exactly
> what you want.

Exactly. They're doing the same thing but for different character sets, so
they have the same name. You then use the module system to distinguish them.
So, the module system is doing its job. The alternative is to do something
like prefix functions with the module name (e.g. isUniAlpha and isASCIIAlpha),
in which case, we're ignoring the module system, and making the names
unnecessarily long. The module system was designed to deal with conflicts
like this. So, if two functions do different things, we give them different
names, but if they're doing the same thing (as in this case), we give them the
same name.

- Jonathan M Davis

Re: Shouldn't have IsAlpha() from std.uni has a different name to avoid confusing from std.ascii?

[Uranuz via Digitalmars-d]

On Thursday, 21 August 2014 at 15:36:41 UTC, ketmar via 
Digitalmars-d wrote:

On Thu, 21 Aug 2014 15:27:46 +
MacAsm via Digitalmars-d  wrote:

Any thoughts? I don't know if I'm missing something but two 
functions (and not methods) with same name is very bad.

they doing much the same, but for different character sets. two
different names will just confuse users.

you can use fully qualified names and/or local imports to use 
exactly

what you want. something like:

  void myFunc (char ch) {
import std.ascii;
if (std.ascii.isAlpha(ch)) ...
  }

local imports rocks! ;-)


It's useful advice. But the only problem that I experience from 
time to time that local imports become source of linker error 
that are not very easy to find. But language descision for this 
is good and I like it a lot!