RE: [Caml-list] Naming conventions

["Gregory Morrisett" <jgm@CS.Cornell.EDU>]

> In Scheme, there is a conventtion that the names of 
> destructive functions end with "!" and predicates end with 
> "?". E.g., "append!" vs. "append", and "null?", "pair?", etc.
> 
> Are there any similar conventions that people use in O'Caml?

I don't think there's a convention.  Part of the reason is that it
tends to be manifest in the type whether or not an operation is
destructive and whether or not it is a predicate.  Consider:

  val push : 'a -> 'a stack -> 'a stack  (* functional *)

versus

  val push : 'a -> 'a stack -> unit        (* imperative *)

That's not to say that it wouldn't be good to have a convention,
especially when something has an interface that looks functional
but does some observable side effect.  Furthermore, it's often
hard to tell constructors from predicates when reading code
(i.e., does "empty" construct an empty stack or is it a predicate
that returns true on an empty stack?) 

I tend to use imp_<id> (as in imp_push) to reflect the fact that 
something imperative is going on, and is_<id> for predicates
(as in is_empty).  

-Greg
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