On 2008 Aug 27, at 11:58, Jonathan Cast wrote:
On Wed, 2008-08-27 at 09:19 +0200, Henning Thielemann wrote:
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.
I doubt very much that the name `drop' means anything until you learn it. In particular, it's meaningless for native speakers of Chinese who haven't learned English, as well. And it's only slightly less meaningless (when you consider what it does) for native speakers of English.
And for that matter, even to me (an experienced programmer) my first (admittedly not entirely off base, just mostly) thought is the Forth/ PostScript "drop". -- brandon s. allbery [solaris,freebsd,perl,pugs,haskell] allbery@kf8nh.com system administrator [openafs,heimdal,too many hats] allbery@ece.cmu.edu electrical and computer engineering, carnegie mellon university KF8NH