John Femiani wrote:
Beman wrote: <Snip>
"stem" is an interesting suggestion. For "word stem", Wikipedia says "In linguistics, a stem (sometimes also theme) is the part of a word that is common to all its inflected variants." That pretty much describes the basename concept.
--Beman
What if the 'replace_extension' (aka 'change_extension') function just took an empy string as a default second argument? Isn't that the same as basename? Then you don't need 'base_name' or 'stem' at all. Also extension/change_extension should not be a member function since they should be defined in a separate header so that people who don't believe in extensions don't have to include them.
While that may be correct in a technical sense, it is too clever by half. The point of renaming functions is to make the interface more obvious and intuitive, and using replace_extension to get the stem seems to me to go in the opposite direction. --Beman