• Denis Koroskin <2korden gmail.com> Jan 29 2009

Denis Koroskin <2korden gmail.com> writes:

Andrei Alexandrescu Wrote:

 It looks like there is endless debate on the naming convention for the 
 range operations. Few saw the obvious bugs in the documentation and 
 examples :o).
 
 So please let's vote once and for all. I will note that I disagree we 
 should ignore what conventions other languages have. Provincialism is 
 the appurtenance of the incult. To that end, I looked around at how some 
 languages define some primitives.
 
 [snip]
 
 So please let's vote once and for all. No choice will please everybody, 
 but I want to settle for something that at least won't displease the 
 most vehement ones :o).
 
 
 Andrei


I don't like first/last. Given a sequence, its first and last elements are
fixed (even if the sequence advances), i.e. first, head, toe and last have
strict ordering to me.

Head/Toe is acceptable, but I don't like it either. Head has a well-known and
unambiguous meaning, which is ok. But toe... (Being a non-native english
speaker) I didn't even know its meaning until I looked it up in a dictionary.
It sounds more like a head/bar pair to me (i.e. completely unrelated).
"Collection's toe element" doesn't tell anything and it takes some time to
recall term's meaning in this context (I got used to it a bit, though).

Other property I don't like about 'toe' is that it is shorter than its
counterpart - 'head' - I think it should be the same or slightly longer.

That said, best names for me are left(most) and right(most), but they are not
listed here :( May I vote for them?