[erlang-questions] Must and May convention

[Valentin Micic]

On 27 Sep 2017, at 11:25 AM, Attila Rajmund Nohl wrote:

> 2017-09-27 11:08 GMT+02:00 Joe Armstrong <erlang@REDACTED>:
> [...]
>> This turns out to be very convenient - I read many files
>> in my programs, so it's nice to know that must_read_file
>> will print a nice error message and terminate
>> if I give it a bad filename.
>> 
>> Note: I can get the program to crash by writing
>> 
>>   {ok, B} = file:read_file(F)
>> 
>> But I don't get a nice error message telling me the filename.
>> 
>> Any takers?
> 
> My problem with all kinds of very common prefixes is that it breaks
> function name autocompletion. Or at least makes it harder to use when
> I have dozens/hundreds/thousands of function names starting with the
> same 3-5 characters - either I have to type those 3-5 characters all
> the time plus any more characters to find unique prefix for
> autocompletion or have to autocomplete twice (one for the may/must
> difference, one for the actual function name). Eclipse (for Java)
> helpfully shows the method signature including return value and thrown
> exceptions - I think this problem should be solved by the IDEs and not
> by naming conventions.
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Maybe you could solve this by using suffix instead of prefix?
Thus, instead of "must" or "may",  you could  just use suffix "throws", if functions will raise an exception.

read( … )  for no exception
read_throws(…) for functions raising exception.

V/