On 5/6/11 11:15 AM, Alex Mason wrote:
Hi All,
I really love the look of this package, but if this is going be *the* iteratee
package, I would absolutely love to see it fix some of the biggest mistakes in
the other iteratee packages, soecifically naming. A change in naming for the
terms iteratee, enumerator and enumeratee would go a hell of a long way here;
Peaker on #haskell suggested Consumer/Producer/Transformer, and there is a lot
of agreement in the channel that these are vastly better names. They’re also
far less intimidating to users.
I personally feel that maybe Transformer isn't such a great name (being closely
associated with monad transformers), and that maybe something like Mapper would
be better, but I'm by no means in love with that name either. More people in
#haskell seem to like Transformer, and I don't think my argument against it is
very strong, so the hivemind seems to have settled on the
Producer/Transformer/Consumer trilogy.
I believe "transducer" is the proper term. (Of course, producers and
consumers are both special cases of transducers, trivializing the input
or output stream, respectively.)
Though, IMO, I don't find the names "producer" and "consumer"
enlightening as to why this particular pattern of iteration/enumeration
is different from the conventional pattern found in OOP's iterators. Any
time you have a bunch of things being created and passed around you have
producers and consumers; the terminology is insufficient to define the
pattern. The shift from "iterator" to "enumerator" helps to capture that
difference. Given as there's no common name for the code calling an
iterator, it's not immediately apparent what the push-based enumerative
version should be called; "iteratee" seems as good as any other name,
because it expresses the duality involved in the switch from the
iterative style.
control : pull, push
producer : iterator, enumerator
consumer : ???, iteratee
Of course, this pattern of names suggests that "enumeratee" should
properly be a backformation for naming the consumer of the pull-based
iterative pattern. But then we're still left with the problem of what
the transducers should be called in both cases.
--
Live well,
~wren
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