Function type naming conventions (original) (raw)

Dan Smith daniel.smith at oracle.com
Fri Jan 4 14:46:35 PST 2013

On Jan 3, 2013, at 2:07 PM, Dan Smith <daniel.smith at oracle.com> wrote:

I'm sure I'll never remember whether IntFunction is int -> int, T -> int, or int -> T, so it'll trip me up a little each time I read it.

Stephen Colebourne makes a similar comment in the comments list. His suggestion is to use a different base name for functions that return primitives -- we already have "Predicate" and "Block"; now we just need "IntThingy" and "DoubleThingy". Stephen suggests "CalcInt", which I don't love, but maybe there's a word out there that nicely conveys the concept much like "Predicate"?

I did a little Googling: "predicate" is a.k.a. "boolean-valued function". "Real-valued function" and "integer-valued function" are also fairly widely-used terms. But I didn't come across any more concise terms for those...

—Dan

More information about the lambda-libs-spec-observers mailing list