[RFC] Naming convention for in-place mutating procs

[mratsim]

Disclaimer: this only applies to procs with a mutating and non-mutating version. Not procs like pop that always mutate.

Context

There seems to be 2 conventions currently for proc that either mutate their arguments in-place or return a new T:

• Prefixing with a m for the mutating version:
  • items and mitems
  • pairs and mpairs
• Have the verb be the in-place mutation and the past participle return a new T
  • reverse and reversed in algorithm
  • sort and sorted
  • rotate and rotated

History

A long time ago (September 2017), I was trying to find a name for in-place reciprocal (x -> 1/x), ensue a conversation on IRC with various propositions including reciprocaled and mreciprocal

Proposal

Some names are very strange to "-ed" but we can always prefix with a m. I would like to make all the new procs that accept out-of-place and in-place versions use the m prefix for their in-place version.

I also would like to add that to NEP-1.

Transition for current procs

I have no idea

[Araq]

As I said on IRC, m prefix is a mutable view into a collection, it doesn't mutate the collection itself. As such there is no inconsistency with -ed named procs. The only thing that is currently lacking is a way to write an in-place strutils.replace for example. This can be named replaceIn, nice and short.