David Abrahams wrote:
I was just reviewing the filesystem docs and came across "leaf()". I'm sure this isn't the first time I've seen it, but this time I picked up a little semantic dissonance. Normally we think of "leaf" in the context of a tree as being a thing with no children. An interior node like a directory that has files or other directories in it is usually not called a "leaf."
Right. And "leaf" never returns an interior node of a path.
I wonder if this is the best possible name?
The names used by the filesystem library were carefully chosen as a matched set. So you can't change a single name without making a corresponding change to the other names (like "branch") it is related to.
Is there a precedent we can draw on in some other language/library? In python, it's os.path.basename(p). Perl, php, and the posix basename command seem to do something similar.
The filesytem names were chosen to be an improvement over the naming used by other libraries and/or languages, which always seemed to me to be misleading. For example, my intuition is that basename("foo.bar") should yield "foo", not "foo.bar". --Beman