> On Oct 20, 2016, at 9:12 AM, Robin Heggelund Hansen <[email protected]> > wrote: > > In Elm 0.18, primes are being removed as valid characters in a > variable/function name.
That’s unfortunate. Non-alphabetical characters can be really useful for signaling intent. For example, an ending <?> can usefully be a quick signal that the function is a boolean predicate. That’s less useful in a statically-typed language, but “less useful” is not the same thing as “useless”. Adding a prime mark has a long, even pre-computer, history of signaling. <x’> quickly tells the reader that the value is intimately bound up with <x> but has a contextually relevant difference. To be less abstract: When working with SVG, it’s really awkward that `Svg.Attributes.x` takes a String argument, given that graphics often involves working with numeric values. So it’s not a horrible idea for graphics code to establish a convention that primed names take a (consistently, thus predictably) nonstandard type. I confidently predict that removing primes won’t result in `xInteger` definitions but rather `x2` - which I’d argue is less clear than x’ I could imagine libraries that said explicitly “In this library, functions doing <some thing> use the <‘> suffix, but functions doing <some other thing> use <!>. (Neither Ruby nor Clojure are really consistent, but experienced users know roughly how to react to functions ending in <!>.) Community pressure could help with that. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Elm Discuss" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
