Edward Diener
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The point of my comment was to encourage not to you names like 'foldl/foldr' at all in your programming endeavors. Shorthand names rather than descriptive names always seems to me a bad way to program. No doubt I am sometimes guilty of it myself but the use of short but cryptic mnemonics always seems to me to be bad. Ages ago when memory was scarce and disk space was scarce the micro-computer world may have had a use for these short mnemonics, as in Unix/Linux etc., but nowadays I see no use for it. C++ very smartly has not pursued the cryptic mnemonics of C as a rule and I see little reason why good C++ programmers should ever follow the cryptic menemonics path anymore. It only makes functionality harder to understand and remember.
I understand your point, and I mostly agree with it. Even though I do not consider foldl/foldr to be cryptic, some other names following the same pattern give me nightmares (strto{k,d,f,l,ld,ll,ul,ull}, seriously?). So I think I understand how you can feel about fold{l,r}. However, for the case of `foldl` and `foldr` precisely, those functions are very well known in the functional programming community (see [1] for example). I think this constitutes a good motivation for using those names. This does not change the fact that fold/reverse_fold aliases will be provided for those that want it. I'll try to add them tomorrow. Regards, Louis [1]: http://goo.gl/ropQkM