I'd personally leave it alone, there are other programming languages that
use the same terminology as well I know I've run across. :-)
Plus I really don't think its worth breaking compat even with a
deprecation. ^.^;
On Thursday, January 18, 2018 at 8:15:37 AM UTC-7, Timotej Fartek wrote:
>
> 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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