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

[Jordan Rose]

> On Feb 1, 2016, at 12:10, Douglas Gregor <dgregor at apple.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jan 29, 2016, at 12:07 PM, Jordan Rose via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto:swift-evolution at swift.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> On Jan 28, 2016, at 14:15, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org <mailto: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.
> 
> This is a great observation. Pull request here shows what this does:
> 
> 	https://github.com/apple/swift-3-api-guidelines-review/pull/9 <https://github.com/apple/swift-3-api-guidelines-review/pull/9>
> 
> and, from the cases we’ve looked at, does a fantastic job of distinguishing the cases where “with” is a separator vs. “with” meaning some kind of selection criteria.

Oh no! Now I'm sad I added a new automated rule based on parts of speech. As I've said before, these rules are necessarily incomplete, difficult for non-native speakers, and problematic when a word can be either a noun or a verb (cf. "displayNameWithLocale(_: NSLocale) -> String" and "highlightWithLevel(_: CGFloat) -> NSColor?").

I'm looking at the diff but it's hard to tell what didn't change. Are there branches that differentiate the two different "with" heuristics?

Jordan

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