proposal: os: fix inconsistent casing in names

[niemeyer]

Is there any sort of rule about the casing of functions used in the "os"
package?  Looking through, it doesn't sound like it's very easy to recall whether a
given function should be called LikeThat or Likethat.

For instance:

Mkdir
MkdirAll
TempDir
Getenv
ForkExec
Readlink
ReadAt
Readdir

It feels very ad-hoc, and hard to recall.

[peterGo]

Comment 1:

It's easy to see what the casing rules are. Mkdir, Getenv, Readlink, and Readdir os
package names are all equivalent to corresponding Linux (and other Unix-style OSs)
lower-case function names with the first character capitalized so that the function
names are exported. MkdirAll, TempDir, ForkExec, and ReadAt have no corresponding OS
functions and use Go standard camel-case names with the first character capitalized so
that the function names are exported.

[niemeyer]

Comment 2:

Not really (e.g. Readdirnames).
Then, even if that was the case, it'd be much better to have it internally consistent
than having a rule which includes knowing what another standard looks like.

[peterGo]

Comment 3:

The Go Nuts mailing list is for Go language questions and discussions.
http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts
These has already been a discussion of these issues: FunctionName caseinconsistencies.
http://groups.google.com/group/golang-nuts/browse_thread/thread/dc52b51b4f007d50/

[niemeyer]

Comment 4:

Yes, and the issue tracker is to report issues? Feels like both are being used the way
they should.  Also, the message from Russ which you point out seems to agree with the
problem I report:
"Names like Readdirnames, which are actual words, might be worth revisiting at some
point."
So, here is an issue to track this.

[rsc]

Comment 5:

Labels changed: added priority-low, removed priority-medium.

Status changed to LongTerm.

[rsc]

Comment 6:

Labels changed: added priority-someday, removed priority-low.

[gopherbot]

Comment 7 by elimisteve:

Agreed. 'strings.SplitN' and 'random.Intn' come to mind as well.

[gopherbot]

Comment 8 by elimisteve:

Agreed. And regarding consistency of casing in general, 'strings.SplitN' and
'random.Intn' come to mind as well.

[rsc]

Comment 9:

Labels changed: added go2.

[rsc]

Comment 10:

Labels changed: added repo-main.

[rsc]

Comment 11:

Adding Release=None to all Priority=Someday bugs.

Labels changed: added release-none.

[bankole7782]

I think this is manageable. It could lead to a lot of hard to do program rewrites.