[Haskell-cafe] Naming scheme for partial functions

[Antoine Latter]

What does "Ex" mean?


On Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Michael Snoyman <michael at snoyman.com> wrote:

> Thanks for the input. We ended up going with an `Ex` suffix, e.g. headEx,
> lastEx.
>
>
> On Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 4:53 AM, Tikhon Jelvis <tikhon at jelv.is> wrote:
>
>> 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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>>>>
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>>
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