[swift-evolution] [swift-evolution-announce] [Review] SE-0045: Add scan, prefix(while:), drop(while:), and iterate to the stdlib

[Chris Lattner]

I’m passing on some feedback from a contributor who preferred to remain anonymous / offlist and emailed the review manager.  These are not my personal comments:

On Apr 28, 2016, at 11:11 AM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
> Proposal:
> 	https://github.com/apple/swift-evolution/blob/master/proposals/0045-scan-takewhile-dropwhile.md
> 

I would really like a different name for scan. While it’s the term of art for Haskell and co, it really seems meaningless to regular programmers (why is “scanning” the way you produce an array of intermediate reduces?), and it would be better to follow the pattern already established elsewhere in the library to give friendlier names e.g. flatMap instead of bind, reduce instead of fold.

I think Python calls it accumulate: http://docs.python.org/3/library/itertools.html#itertools.accumulate

While this isn’t great either, because you can think of reduce as “accumulating” a value, I still think it’ll be easy for people to understand the difference and remember which is which (since reducing sounds like boiling down, accumulating more like gathering multiple things and sounds similar to “cumulative”).

I also think it would be nice for both scan and reduce to have overloads that take the first value as the initial (and return an optional) but that’s probably a separate proposal.

Other than that, I think these will all make very useful additions to the library.