Question

I’m build a library for generic reporting, Excel(using Spreadsheet), and most of the time I’ll be writing things out on the last created worksheet (or active as I mostly refer to it).

So I’m wondering if there’s a naming convention for methods that are mostly sugar to the normal/unsugared method.

For instance I saw a blog post, scroll down to Composite, a while ago where the author used the #method for the sugared, and #method! when unsugared/manual.
Could this be said to be a normal way of doing things, or just an odd implementation?

What I’m thinking of doing now is:

add_row(data)  
add_row!(sheet, data)

This feels like a good fit to me, but is there a consensus on how these kinds of methods should be named?

Edit
I’m aware that the ! is used for “dangerous” methods and ? for query/boolean responses. Which is why I got curious whether the usage in Prawn (the blog post) could be said to be normal.

Answer 1

I think it’s fair to say that your definitions:

add_row(data)  
add_row!(sheet, data)

are going to confuse Ruby users. There is a good number of naming conventions is the Ruby community that are considered like a de-facto standard for naming. For example, the bang methods are meant to modify the receiver, see map and map!. Another convention is add the ? as a suffix to methods that returns a boolean. See all? or any? for a reference.