[racket-dev] API naming conventions (Push #25466)

For the record, I find having two things that combine match and define
in different ways where the name difference is - vs / and swapping the
order of the words to be quite unfortunate.

Plus, we should just have match built into all of the binding forms.

Robby

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 5:48 PM, Eli Barzilay <eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> A few minutes ago, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>
>> Eli, can you explain again -- perhaps in different words -- why
>> define/match is a bad name? I understand that we have match-define
>> and define/match now. While I agree that having two of these forms
>> with remotely related functionality is possibly confusing, I don't
>> see why match-define is really a better kind of name than
>> define/match.
>
> Well, I suggested `match-define' (before I realized that there was
> already one) because it follows the same naming convention for the
> rest of the library.
>
>
>> If you are saying, that define/match is bad because it is too
>> distinct from match-define I understand the name argument.
>
> If that was the only issue, then I wouldn't have objected so strongly
> to it -- but the fact that there *is* an existing `match-define', and
> the fact that it does something different, mean that the match
> interface becomes extremely confusing.  And that's not only for
> newbies -- I can easily see myself not remembering which one of them
> is doing which job.
>
>
> A bit later, John Clements wrote:
>>
>> Violent agreement; I'm saying that the *names* are the same (modulo
>> a stylistic choice), not that the meanings are the same.
>
> As for an attempt to explain why they're a bad combination, John
> indeed put it nicely here.  We have two forms whose meaning is a
> combination of a `define' and a `match', and hanging the difference on
> the order of the two terms (and a `/' vs a `-') means that for human
> readers, the difference is far from apparent.
>
> And Matthias Felleisen added:
>>
>> (I really dislike match-define. But it's historic so we're stuck.)
>
> I completely agree -- I'd prefer a `define-match' or a `define/match',
> in the same way that I'd also prefer a `let-match' etc.  (And I also
> agree that the historic choice is an important restriction.)
>
> --
>           ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                     http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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