Maybe it confuses me because I'm not a native speaker. Would you suggest we
leave it alone (for now)?
On Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 4:11:16 PM UTC+1, OvermindDL1 wrote:
>
> I'd probably have chosen String.repeat, however String.duplicate makes
> sense to me grammatically as well as duplicating tends to be used 'as'
> multiplication in common speech (around where I am anyway, central USA).
>
>
> On Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 2:59:32 AM UTC-7, Timotej Fartek wrote:
>>
>> Hello! First of all, good job on Elixir. It really is a joy to build
>> applications with it.
>> Now about my proposal. I think that the function "duplicate/2" in the
>> module String can be a bit confusing with the current naming. When I read
>> "duplicate", the thing that immediately pops into my mind is "make a copy
>> of", "multiply by two" etc. so when I'm working with String.duplicate I'm
>> always a bit confused as to what is going to happen with my string.
>> If I call String.duplicate("a", 2) to me it looks like the end result is
>> going to be "aaaa", because we take "a", we duplicate it (so it's "aa") and
>> then we duplicate that again (because n=2), and return "aaaa". Of course
>> this assumption is wrong as the end result is "aa".
>> What String.duplicate actually does is *multiply the string n times*.
>> Python (the language) has this simplified to the point where you actually
>> write "a" * 2, to get the result "aa".
>> I suggest we do something similar with Elixir and come up with a better
>> name for the duplicate function. I propose String.repeat or String.multiply
>> but I am also open to other ideas if you think this might cause extra
>> confusion. The most technically correct version of the name in my opinion
>> would be String.multiply, because even with String.repeat there could be
>> some confusion: does String.repeat("a", 1) return "a" or "aa"?
>> I would like to make a pull request with the new function but first I
>> want to hear what the community thinks about this idea.
>> Another version of the name could be "times". String.times("a", 1) would
>> in my opinion clearly return "a". String.times("a", 3) would clearly return
>> "aaa".
>>
>> Anyway this post is long enough as is 😅.
>> Thanks again for the wonderful work so far!
>>
>>
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