Re: Discuss changing the behaviour of append()
- Posted by petelomax Jun 08, 2014
- 5173 views
I believe among new users or infrequent users, if a user passes an atom as a first argument to append, it is probably because they are accidentally reversing the order of the parameters and not because they want to treat atoms as length-one sequences that contain that atom.
I was just going to say something similar, in particular str=prepend(ch,str) has been nicely caught for me a few times, but to be honest if I know I'm adding an atom, I'll use &, and if I'm adding a sequence, the extra type check helps not one tiny bit.
However, I would like to suggest appenda() [and prependa], see what people have to say about that. Or maybe appendany()/prependany() if you prefer.
Pete
Edit: "Why must append have a sequence as the first parameter and concatenate doesn't?"
That certainly hits the nail on the head. Apart from "trying to be helpful but not really managing it", I got no answer to that.
