[erlang-questions] Some functions must return values other may do so...

[Loïc Hoguin]

On 08/15/2015 04:56 PM, Joe Armstrong wrote:
> For a while now I've adopted a convention for naming functions
> which I find rather useful, so I thought I'd discuss it here,
> (it's a kind of RFC-2119 lite notation :-)
>
> Rule1: Functions which return {ok,X} | {error,W} are called may_<name>
>
> Rule2: Functions which return a value or raise an exception are called
> must_<name>

The concept is interesting, the implementation is too verbose for most 
people to follow it. That, and having a whole API fit under the letter M 
is not the best idea for documentation.

Some languages have function names like open_file! or open_file? and so 
on, with special meanings attached to them (sometimes just a 
convention). We can't do that in Erlang, but something like 'open_file' 
for Rule1 and 'open_file!' for Rule2 would be pretty explicit. They 
would be the equivalent of "Please open the file thank you very much oh 
you failed? too bad" and "Open this file! Now!"

The only thing in that spirit that we can do in Erlang today is 
something like open_file_ (meh) and open_file@ (not as bad imo).

So using something like open_file@ could be interesting. But contrary to 
what I was saying in my email so far, I would suggest having open_file 
be the crash-only version (because I believe it fits Erlang programming 
best) and open_file@ be the one that returns errors.

If you follow that, you not only know which function may return errors, 
but also you are explicitly requesting errors to be returned to your 
code which means a great deal for clarity, without sacrificing the 
spirit of "let it crash".

I might consider doing something like this in Cowboy.

-- 
Loïc Hoguin
http://ninenines.eu
Author of The Erlanger Playbook,
A book about software development using Erlang