[Haskell-cafe] naming convention for maybes?

[Evan Laforge]

> Of course, naming will always be a matter of taste. For instance I would not
> write maybe_something, because I prefer camel case, that is, maybeSomething.
> On the other hand, I already wrote some Wiki articles that you may read as
> suggestions for certain naming conventions:
>  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Qualified_names
>  http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Pairs_of_identifiers
>  and other articles in Category:Style. You may add an article for
> suggestions of how to name lists, maybes, eithers etc.

WRT to camel vs. underscores, I think it's mostly orthogonal, because
you can always convert between them: mbX or mb_x.  Of course a nice
thing about the trailing 's' is that it's the same for both.

I wish I had ideas for the other types... when there isn't something
more descriptive, I just concatenate pairs, e.g. [(Code, Name)]
becomes code_names (codeNames for the camels).  Eithers I don't have
to name often, but I do the same concatenation.  Maps are key_to_val,
or just to_key (then 'lookup key to_val' reads nicely), or by_key, or
sometimes plural like "vals", depending on the context.  Sets I use
plural like lists.

For functions, 'is_' for predicates, like many other languages.  '_of'
for projections.

Of course for the variables, often the nicest is to avoid the name
entirely by giving it directly to some combinator.  If we had the
'lambda case' or monadic case then I could get rid of a lot of my
'maybe_' names.

Hmm, maybe I do have some opinions :)

Sounds like 'mb' is pretty widespread, and it seems like something I
could get used to, so maybe I'll start using that.