ruby-core

Issue #16295 has been updated by shevegen (Robert A. Heiler).


I agree that + and - are not very elegant. They are short, so useful, but this is actually
the main reason why I prefer the much longer .dup instead, and don't use + and -.

I often prefer short english words/names, within reason. It is always a trade off of course.
Ruby often allows "both" styles.

> They very often force to use parentheses, which is annoying

I agree in general. Being able to omit parens is great. I personally use parens in
method definitions if there is at least one argument; other ruby users omit the parens
completely, which I can understand, even if I don't use that style. But more importantly
I agree that being able to decide whether to use parens or not is GREAT. In python you
are forced to use them, and I find this annoying. (I really think ruby is better than
python in many ways.)

To the suggestion itself for the names:

I think all of dedup, deduplicate, mutable or mut are a bit ... clumsy.

IF the question were SOLELY between:

    dedup versus deduplicate

and

    mut versus mutable

Then I think the shorter names would be a tiny bit better. But .dedup is not a great name,
and .mut is a bit confusing. .deduplicate seems too long, I actually typoed when I tried
to write it just now :) - .mutable is ... hmm. The name seems a bit more like .mutable?
to me, as a query method.

I am not sure that these names are great.

Perhaps we can come up with names that describe the behaviour, without
having to focus on + or -.

If I understand the problem correctly then the primary issue is to find good name
candidates? If so perhaps people can give some suggestions.

Perhaps some name with .freeze_* or something like that, or .unfreeze (not sure
here, I think we can not unfreeze, only freeze, so such a name may cause
confusion).

Actually we already have .dup which I assume is short for .duplicate. So perhaps
the methods could be centered around .dup.

    .de_dup
    .un_dup
    .dup+
    .dup-       # ok ok that does not work but ...
    .dup_plus
    .dup_minus  # clumsy too ...
    .chain_dup  # uhm ...
    .dup_chain  # sounds like a music song
    .freeze_dup # no idea why this even came up ...
    .duppity    # just sounds good

Well - short break from finding silly names ...

If we look at the documentation, we have:

-----

 +str → str (mutable)

If the string is frozen, then return duplicated mutable string.

If the string is not frozen, then return the string itself.

-str → str (frozen)

Returns a frozen, possibly pre-existing copy of the string.

The string will be deduplicated as long as it is not tainted, or has any instance variables set on it.

-----

So how about ...

   .frozen_copy
   .frozen_or_copy

Actually, reading the documentation, .dedup seems to be ok:

    .dedup

Even if the name is not perfect, it may be better than not
having an alternative.

I can't really think of a great name though. Perhaps others can
give some more ideas.

----------------------------------------
Feature #16295: Chainable aliases for String#-@ and String#+@
https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16295#change-82490

* Author: byroot (Jean Boussier)
* Status: Open
* Priority: Normal
* Assignee: 
* Target version: 
----------------------------------------
Original discussion https://bugs.ruby-lang.org/issues/16150?next_issue_id=16147&prev_issue_id=16153#note-40

In #16150, @headius raised the following concern about `String#-@` and `String#+@`:

headius (Charles Nutter) wrote:
> > Not exactly, -@ and +@ makes this much simpler
> 
> I do like the unary operators, but they also have some precedence oddities:
> 
> ```
> >> -"foo".size
> => -3
> >> (-"foo").size
> => 3
> ```
> 
> And it doesn't work at all if you're chaining method calls:
> 
> ```
> >> +ary.to_s.frozen?
> NoMethodError: undefined method `+@' for false:FalseClass
> 	from (irb):8
> 	from /usr/bin/irb:11:in `<main>'
> ```
> 
> But you are right, instead of the explicit `dup` with possible freeze you could use `-` or `+` on the result of `to_s`. However it's still not safe to modify it since it would modify the original string too.

After working for quite a while with those, I have to say I agree. They very often force to use parentheses, which is annoying, and an indication that regular methods would be preferable to unary operators.


In response @matz proposed to alias them as `String#+` and `String#-` without arguments:

>  How about making String#+ and #- without argument behave like #+@ and #-@ respectively, so that we can write:
>  
>  ```
>  "foo".-.size
>  ary.+.to_s.frozen?
>  ```


My personal opinion is that descriptive method names would be preferable to `+/-`:

> IMHO `.-` and `.+` is not very elegant. Proper method names explaining the intent would be preferable.
> 
>   - `-@` could be `dedup`, or `deduplicate`.
>   - `+@` could be `mutable` or `mut`.





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