Text.ParserCombinators.* is a bad name

[Bernard Pope]

On Wed, 2006-03-08 at 12:15 +0000, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
> David Menendez <zednenem at psualum.com> wrote:
> 
> > > Sounds reasonable. I wonder whether HughesPJ is also a candidate for
> > > renaming to something more descriptive? (No offence to John and
> > > Simon)
> > 
> > We wouldn't want to make name of the HughesPJ module too generic, as
> > there are also other libraries of pretty printing combinators out
> > there, such as Daan Leijen's PPrint.
> 
> Indeed, the whole point of the 'HughesPJ' suffix was to make the name
> _more_ descriptive.  There are several widespread combinator libraries
> for both parsing and pretty-printing, all with different interfaces.
> They all used to be named simply and blandly, like:
>    ParseLib
>    Pretty
> and it was difficult to know exactly whose library was intended.  In the
> absence of any truly distinguishing internal features, 

Yes. I meant that Text.Combinators.HughesPJ doesn't really say what job
the combinators are for. 

> at least naming
> the authors gives a clue to which paper you should be reading.  :-)

:-) 

But then HughesPJ should be called Hughes!

Anyway I agree that classifying things can be a rather tricky business.

There must be a significant point of difference between, say the Wadler
library, and the Hughes library, and I wonder if that could not be
exposed in the name? (a rhetorical question)

Cheers,
Bernie.