Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote: > On Sun, 2008-07-20 at 17:43 +0100, David-Sarah Hopwood wrote: >> If it is obscure enough that conciseness doesn't matter, I suggest >> MutationInsensitivelyCompatible. > > Unfortunately, I suspect it is not quite that obscure. I have asked > Swaroop to send out an example where it arises. > > The closest I have come to something seems OK is: > > Mutable? > > With the '?' indicating optionality rather than predication. My main > concern is that '?' is used by convention to mean predicates elsewhere > in LISP-like languages.
I'd find that quite confusing. The description you gave before for top-copy-compat didn't seem to be simplifiable to just "mutable". > Predicates do not usually appear in types, however, so maybe this is > okay here. Types / typeclasses are usually named either as nouns, or as adjectives describing the set of values intended to be of that type. So I would guess that a type called 'Mutable' was supposed to indicate values that are (in some sense) mutable, regardless of the presence or absence of ?. Nice uses an initial ? for option types: <http://nice.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/twiki/view/Doc/OptionTypes>, which avoids confusion with the Lisp convention (and the ? is in the right place to be read as "possible" or "optional" or "maybe a"). -- David-Sarah Hopwood _______________________________________________ bitc-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev
