[Haskell-cafe] Naming scheme for partial functions

[Tikhon Jelvis]

For what it's worth, OCaml's Core library does this with _exn, so they
would call a partial last "last_exn". I would actually prefer an
abbreviation of some sort (like exn) as long as it's a consistent
convention. Using a full word like "exception" or "partial" adds to much
noise in my opinion, especially if the base name (like "last") is shorter
than the suffix!

Also, I think a suffix would be better than a prefix, if only to group
things conveniently when sorted alphabetically.


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 9:36 AM, Atze van der Ploeg <atzeus at gmail.com>wrote:

> unprovenLast ?
> On Jan 30, 2014 6:33 PM, "Michael Snoyman" <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:
>
>> Greg Weber and I have been discussing some changes to
>> mono-traversable[1]. One of the modules we provide is Data.NonNull, which
>> provides total versions of functions like `last`. A change we're looking at
>> would require having a partial version of `last` defined in a separate
>> typeclass (IsSequence), which would allowing for more optimized
>> implementations of the total `last` function for datatypes which support it
>> (e.g., strict ByteStrings).
>>
>> But what should we name it? I'm sure everyone's familiar with the
>> `unsafe` naming convention, but that's not appropriate here: standard usage
>> shows `unsafe` meaning a function which can cause a segfault.
>>
>> I initially named it `partialLast`, but partial can also imply partial
>> function application. Greg brought up the idea of suffixing the function
>> with something like `Throws` or `Errors`, which I think I'm a bit partial
>> to myself[2].
>>
>> So my questions are:
>>
>> * Is there some already used naming scheme out there for partial
>> functions which I've missed?
>> * Do people have any ideas to throw into the mix?
>>
>> Michael
>>
>> [1] https://github.com/snoyberg/mono-traversable/pull/21
>> [2] Pardon the pun.
>>
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