Ben Moseley
On the naming side of things, I'd just like to say I agree with Roman here - I think having synonyms in an API is a bad idea.
Agreed
I think there might be an argument that synonyms improve things for those who know the API really well - but that comes at the cost of worsening the experience for those (i.e. most) who know it moderately or fairly well and thus - when reading code written by others - find themselves struggling to remember whether the variants that they don't use personally are subtly different or not.
Exactly. And it’s very easy for someone who wants a synonym to define it. There’s an issue in this case of avoiding breaking code, but including them, deprecating them and hiding them from the documentation seems to solve that.
P.S. I think "intercalate" is an awful name,
What have you got against it? For the record I was against introducing a name for such a short function (argument is similar to that against synonyms), but it does mean exactly the right thing.
and "unintercalate" is certainly no better ;-)
I’ll grant that that is very ugly. -- Jón Fairbairn Jon.Fairbairn@cl.cam.ac.uk