[erlang-questions] Proposal: add lists:intersperse/2 and lists:intercalate/2

[Chandru]

On 7 March 2016 at 16:04, Loïc Hoguin <essen@REDACTED> wrote:

> On 03/07/2016 04:53 PM, Garrett Smith wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 9:28 AM Jesper Louis Andersen
>> <jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED
>> <mailto:jesper.louis.andersen@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>     On Mon, Mar 7, 2016 at 4:08 PM, Garrett Smith <g@REDACTED
>>     <mailto:g@REDACTED>> wrote:
>>
>>         It's vague, as is intercalculate, but as it's superficially
>>         doing what string "join" does with chars has some precedence
>>         within Erlang. I wouldn't call it hopeless.
>>
>>
>>     I'm probably leaning away from using 'join' at this point, since
>>     'join' already have type
>>
>>     join :: Monad M => m (m a) -> m a
>>
>>     so from an FP perspective, that name is highly confusing since it is
>>     in use in monadic context and is used to join monadic data into its
>>     own monadic context. For a list, join is essentially 'append':
>>
>>     Prelude Control.Monad> join ["a", "b", "c"]
>>     "abc"
>>
>>     But join is monadic, so `join $ Just Nothing` evaluates to `Nothing`.
>>
>>
>> Sigh. Okay, so the future naming discussions will involve with word
>> monad and monadic?
>>
>> You've seen the discussions around adoption and the disruptive influence
>> of Elixir?
>>
>> For whatever reason FP pedantry is not a draw for me. When I need
>> inspiration I look to Python. Maybe that's the wrong direction and we
>> need to drive our community through more gates.
>>
>
> I am completely with you on that. If the function was called
> intercalculate I'd never find it and would continue writing my own.
>
>
I second this. I'm part of the vast number of unwashed masses who've never
heard of the term intercalculate, and if I came across it in a developer's
code would think that they were being a bit too clever. Like many others I
have written this piece of code several times and invariably named it
'concat_with_separator' - a mouthful but it conveys (at least to me) what
exactly the function is doing.

cheers,
Chandru
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