Re: master 87e422f: Beef up the Emacs string utility set a bit

[Mattias Engdegård]

22 dec. 2020 kl. 15.48 skrev Lars Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>:

> I'm not really enthusiastic about any of these names.  When we're
> talking about suffixes, we're usually talking about file name suffixes
> like ".png", and this has nothing to do with that.

Suffix and prefix are (in computing and mathematics) generic terms for the 
trailing and leading parts of a sequence such as a string. There's nothing in 
the words that ties them to file names.

>  These are functions
> for limiting the length of a string, and would be called
> `string-truncate' if it hadn't been for `string-truncate-left' already
> existing and doing something else, and `truncate-string-to-width' doing
> something else yet again.
> 
> That is, these functions are not for picking out a part of a string, but
> for limiting the length, which makes `string-prefix' misleading as for
> what the intention is.

Naming pure functions after what they return is standard practice. How is that 
misleading?
(And who are we to say what the user's intention is?)