SrcLoc/SrcSpan/Located naming

[Isaac Dupree]

Do we make any attempt to keep the GHC API consistent between major 
releases, or is the policy generally just to make any naming changes 
that we find fitting for GHC's purposes?

-Isaac


Thomas Schilling wrote:
> I think the inconsistencies are mostly because SrcSpan was added
> later.  Patches to improve the problematic cases would (most likely)
> be welcome.
> 
> 2009/7/20 Isaac Dupree <ml at isaac.cedarswampstudios.org>:
>> is a confusing mess!
>> The most important module is named SrcLoc, which is acceptable.
>> It contains three types,
>> SrcLoc,
>> SrcSpan, which approximately is two SrcLocs (begin and end),
>> and Located, which combines a SrcSpan (not a SrcLoc!) with an arbitrary
>> other type.
>>
>> In practice (well, in my case at least) you almost always want a SrcSpan and
>> not a SrcLoc.
>> Many of the functions on SrcLoc have "srcLoc" in their names, which is good.
>>
>> However, so do many of the functions on Located-and-SrcSpan, which is
>> terrible.  It gets a little worse when you combine with the (fairly sensibly
>> named functions) at Name.NamedThing
>> noLoc, getLoc, addCLoc, combineLocs work on Locateds.
>> noSrcLoc, getSrcLoc, work on SrcLocs.  Instead, noSrcSpan and getSrcSpan are
>> the ones you want.
>>
>> Okay it's not quite as bad as I thought.  You want to avoid a function iff
>> it contains the whole phrase "srcLoc".  But I still got confused a lot of
>> times.  I wonder if we could rename something so that SrcLoc and Located
>> don't have the same word-part in them, because they aren't really closely
>> enough related?  Even if it's just renaming "SrcLoc" to "SrcSpot" or
>> something.
>>
>> It's also annoying that Name.getSrcSpan doesn't work on Locateds (inevitable
>> I guess since it's type-different from NamedThing), but the function you
>> have to use instead is called getLoc, even though it also produces a SrcSpan
>> (only the argument-type is different).  Hmm.
>>
>> -Isaac
>>
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> 
> 
>