On Monday, 22 June 2015 at 11:51:27 UTC, Vladimir Panteleev wrote:
Just to reiterate, I want to stress that finding a perfect name is of secondary concern to deciding to change the name in the first place. A big part of the argument against renaming things is "look how much debate there is about what it should be called, it's obvious there is no consensus, let's just leave things as they are".
I think that it's abundantly clear that the names are not well chosen. It's a guarantee that you're going to have to look at the docs to have any clue as to which is lazy and which isn't. I completely agree with adding lazy versions of the functions like Walter is doing, and our naming situation sucks on some level given that we have never named things based on whether they were lazy or not, and so there really is no way that all of the names in Phobos are going to be consistent in that manner (not without breaking more code than we're willing to break anyway), but the new names do seem particularly bad. A function that starts with set doesn't even sound like it's lazy anyway - not to mention, wasn't setExt the old function that std.path had before it was revamped?
Naming stuff is hard, but there is definitely a cost to poor names, which is something that Walter rarely seems to acknowledge, especially if it means changing an existing name - but since this is about functions that haven't even been released yet, I wouldn't think that it would be as big a deal to change them.
- Jonathan M Davis
