Re: Text.ParserCombinators.* is a bad name

On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 12:15 +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:

David Menendez wrote:

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Sounds reasonable. I wonder whether HughesPJ is also a candidate for renaming to something more descriptive? (No offence to John and Simon)

We wouldn't want to make name of the HughesPJ module too generic, as there are also other libraries of pretty printing combinators out there, such as Daan Leijen's PPrint.

Indeed, the whole point of the 'HughesPJ' suffix was to make the name _more_ descriptive. There are several widespread combinator libraries for both parsing and pretty-printing, all with different interfaces. They all used to be named simply and blandly, like: ParseLib Pretty and it was difficult to know exactly whose library was intended. In the absence of any truly distinguishing internal features,

Yes. I meant that Text.Combinators.HughesPJ doesn't really say what job the combinators are for.

at least naming the authors gives a clue to which paper you should be reading. :-)

:-) But then HughesPJ should be called Hughes! Anyway I agree that classifying things can be a rather tricky business. There must be a significant point of difference between, say the Wadler library, and the Hughes library, and I wonder if that could not be exposed in the name? (a rhetorical question) Cheers, Bernie.