Proposal: rename Data.Map.fromAscList to Data.Map.unsafeFromAscList

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi,

I totally disagree. unsafe/unchecked means nothing other than "beware
of the bogey monster", or for most Haskell users, "just another
function that might launch missiles". fromAscList has the specific
precondition for this function in the name. Should we call unsafeHead?
uncheckedHead? mightCrashIfNotConsHead?

Adding a check for the precondition would be the ideal thing to do,
but I wouldn't want to do it if it added an extra comparison or was
any runtime cost at all. Perhaps adding checkedFromAscList might be
acceptable, but I can't imagine anyone would call it until they'd got
it wrong the first time, at which point the chances of them getting it
wrong again are quite low.

Thanks

Neil

On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 1:36 PM, Christian Maeder
<Christian.Maeder at dfki.de> wrote:
>
> There is an old thread about this, where Daan suggested "unchecked"
> instead of "unsafe".
> http://www.haskell.org/pipermail/haskell/2004-March/013787.html
>
> "unsafe" reminds to "IO" stuff.
>
> Didn't you read the comment about fromAscList? Isn't the name long
> enough to scare you?
>
> Would you have not taken "unsafeFromAscList" under the same
> circumstances you've chosen "fromAscList"?
>
> Cheers Christian
>
> Chris Eidhof wrote:
>> Hey all,
>>
>> I had some code where the function elems said a certain key was present,
>> but looking it up returned a Nothing. After some debugging I found out
>> that it did work if I used Prelude's lookup in combination with toList.
>> After even more debugging it turned out there was a fromAscList
>> somewhere deep down in my code where it should have been a fromList.
>>
>> Now, I know that I shouldn't have used fromAscList and that it was
>> totally my fault. I also realize this is something that can't easily be
>> checked using the type system, so I propose we do the next best thing:
>> prefix the name with 'unsafe'.
>>
>> -chris
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