What’s the convention for using an asterisk at the end of a function name in Clojure and other Lisp dialects

clojurecoding-stylenaming-conventions

Note that I'm not talking about ear muffs in symbol names, an issue that is discussed at Conventions, Style, and Usage for Clojure Constants? and How is the `*var-name*` naming-convention used in clojure?. I'm talking strictly about instances where there is some function named foo that then calls a function foo*.

Best Answer

In Clojure it basically means "foo* is like foo, but somehow different, and you probably want foo". In other words, it means that the author of that code couldn't come up with a better name for the second function, so they just slapped a star on it.

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Python – the naming convention in Python for variable and function names

See Python PEP 8: Function and Variable Names:

Function names should be lowercase, with words separated by underscores as necessary to improve readability.

Variable names follow the same convention as function names.

mixedCase is allowed only in contexts where that's already the prevailing style (e.g. threading.py), to retain backwards compatibility.

What’s the best name for a non-mutating “add” method on an immutable collection

In situations like that, I usually go with Concat. That usually implies to me that a new object is being created.

var p = listA.Concat(listB);
var k = listA.Concat(item);

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Related Solutions

Python – the naming convention in Python for variable and function names

What’s the best name for a non-mutating “add” method on an immutable collection

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