Re: 2533: Generic functions that take integral arguments should work the same way as their prelude counterparts

On Tue, 26 Aug 2008, John Meacham wrote:

But is also makes the functions less useful and another source of non-completeness. I certainly always considered accepting negative numbers a feature of those functions and not an infelicity. Sometimes you want 'drop 1 xs' and other times you want 'tail xs' (or equivalent).

It's very confusing for readers of your programs, if you use 'drop 1' instead of 'tail'. The names 'drop' and 'tail' don't give the reader a hint, that 'drop' works for empty lists and 'tail' doesn't. 'drop 1' and 'tail' should behave identically for empty lists and a function with different behaviour should have a different name.