Re: [Haskell-cafe] Naming scheme for partial functions

It means "throws an *ex*ception." On Sun, Feb 9, 2014 at 5:04 AM, Antoine Latter wrote:

What does "Ex" mean?

On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Michael Snoyman wrote:

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Thanks for the input. We ended up going with an `Ex` suffix, e.g. headEx, lastEx.

On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Tikhon Jelvis wrote:

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For what it's worth, OCaml's Core library does this with _exn, so they would call a partial last "last_exn". I would actually prefer an abbreviation of some sort (like exn) as long as it's a consistent convention. Using a full word like "exception" or "partial" adds to much noise in my opinion, especially if the base name (like "last") is shorter than the suffix!

Also, I think a suffix would be better than a prefix, if only to group things conveniently when sorted alphabetically.

On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Atze van der Ploeg wrote:

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unprovenLast ? On Jan 30, 2014 6:33 PM, "Michael Snoyman" wrote:

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Greg Weber and I have been discussing some changes to mono-traversable[1]. One of the modules we provide is Data.NonNull, which provides total versions of functions like `last`. A change we're looking at would require having a partial version of `last` defined in a separate typeclass (IsSequence), which would allowing for more optimized implementations of the total `last` function for datatypes which support it (e.g., strict ByteStrings).

But what should we name it? I'm sure everyone's familiar with the `unsafe` naming convention, but that's not appropriate here: standard usage shows `unsafe` meaning a function which can cause a segfault.

I initially named it `partialLast`, but partial can also imply partial function application. Greg brought up the idea of suffixing the function with something like `Throws` or `Errors`, which I think I'm a bit partial to myself[2].

So my questions are:

* Is there some already used naming scheme out there for partial functions which I've missed? * Do people have any ideas to throw into the mix?

Michael

[1] https://github.com/snoyberg/mono-traversable/pull/21 [2] Pardon the pun.

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