Re: DData revision (isSubsetOf / shorter names)

Daan Leijen writes:

On Tue, 16 Mar 2004 12:44:03 +0100, Christian Maeder wrote:

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Simon Marlow wrote:

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I vote for consistently using isXXXX for predicates.

Me too - while I'm not terribly fond of Hungarian notation, I always liked Scheme's predicate? and (to a slightly lesser extent) Lisp's predicate-p. Names like 'isEmpty' has the nice property of letting us use 'empty' for the constant (e.g. the empty set, finite map, whatever)

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this would (only) affect "null" (maybe "isEmpty" again) and "member".

So it is agreed: we use "isXXXX" :-)

Hmm... s1 `isSubsetOf` s2 vs s1 `isSubset` s2 isSubsetOf s1 s2 isSubset s1 s2 I'm not sure I have any clear preference. ..Of reads slightly clearer in infix notation, but is arguably a bit more confusing in prefix.

ps. I have a general remark towards nice cozy names like "subset", and "null", versus consistent COBOL names like "isSubsetOf" and "isEmpty", I believe that we should target an audience that sporadically uses the library and those people must be able to guess names

I think the most important thing is to have a nice, consistent, language-wide convention. I've often wanted the operator vs. function application preference done the opposite way, but at least I have a simple rule to disambiguate, so I don't have to look it up all the time. -kzm -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants