[swift-evolution] rename dropFirst() and dropLast()

[Daniel Duan]

I suppose it’s appropriate to go into grammars since we are in a language mailing list :)

Present Participle is just an official name for “verb in present tense”, as in “I am *writing* an email”. Let’s put the example from API Guideline to test. I hope you agree that “someText.strippingNewlines()” as a non-mutating method name is grammatical *somehow*. So, does it read as

	self is *stripping newlines*, here’s X.

…or does this make more sense…

	*stripping newlines* from self gives X.

?

I tend to think the latter. There’s a fancy name for it as well: gerund phrase.


> On Dec 29, 2015, at 2:55 PM, Kevin Ballard <kevin at sb.org> wrote:
> 
> On Tue, Dec 29, 2015, at 01:33 PM, Daniel Duan wrote:
>> For concrete types that conform to CollectionType:
>> 
>> [2, 1, 3].removeFirst()    // => 2
>> [2, 1, 3].removingFirst() // => [1, 3]
>> 
>> seems like what the “non-mutating counterpart” guideline is aiming for. As another example, the guideline includes “stripNewlines()” and “strippingNewlines()”.
>> 
>> For SequenceType conforming types that aren’t CollectionTypes, they would be stuck with “removingFirst()”, which, technically, is a noun phrase (again, not my personal favorite). I don’t this result is against anything in the guidelines.
> 
> It's technically not a noun phrase at all. I believe you're thinking of gerunds, where a verb with an -ing ending is used as a noun. But "removing" in "removingFirst()" is not being used as a noun; the method does not represent the act of removing, but instead it returns a new value constructed "by removing first". I believe this is called the Present Participle.
> 
> -Kevin Ballard