[swift-evolution] [Review] SE-0005 Better Translation of Objective-C APIs Into Swift

[Jordan Rose]

> On Jan 28, 2016, at 14:15, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
>> I'm very used to "fooWithBar: baz" meaning either "get me the foo that
>> has a bar matching baz" or "create me a foo with its bar set to
>> baz". 
> 
> That's great, when that's what "with" means.
> 
>> But I'm not sure this new convention is any worse, now that the base
>> name isn't assumed to include the first argument.
> 
> The problem is that, I'm guessing at least 50% of the time, "with" is
> just used as a vacuous connector to make the method name sound
> grammatical, and "fooWithBar" doesn't actually mean the "foo" has-a
> "bar."  In these cases, it's actively misleading. I know that's not what
> you were posting about, but I felt it had to be said :-/

I actually don't think this is true when "foo" is a noun (and searching through the selector dump Doug made a long time ago seems to back that up).

Exceptions:
- "fooWithOptions", but that's already caught by the default parameter rule.
- "fooWithLocale", which uses the locale to build the result.
- "commonPrefixWithString", where the "with" isn't quite vacuous.

But when "foo" is a verb (or when it's a later parameter that's just "withBar") it does seem pretty vacuous.

Jordan


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