sort.Reverse consistent with rest of standard library?

Technical Discussion
#1

I’m interested to hear some thoughts on whether sort.Reverse is consistent with most other implementations in the Go standard library.

On first look it seems like a slightly indulgent way to tell sort.Sort to do a reverse sort and does not read particularly nicely, i.e:

sort.Sort(sort.Reverse(sort.StringSlice(xs)))

Would this be more readable and more easily taught to beginners?

sort.ReverseSort(xs)

Do different areas of the standard library have a different implementation style due to preferences of the authors? Is there an effort made to maintain consistency across the board?

#2

Not quite getting why you say sort.Sort(sort.Reverse(sort.StringSlice(xs))) is inconsistent and sort.ReverseSort(xs) is consistent.

Learning wise, I think reaching sort package - sort - Go Packages is already pretty good to get you started, what you’re describing seems more like a convinience function, one might argue it hides important details for new comers to understand what is happenning.

Readability wise I think that version is more readable, but it could be weird having 2 ways of doing the same thing (in the same package), that are functionally equivalent.

1 Like
#3

Are there lots of other examples in the standard library where you would do something like sort.Sort(sort.Reverse(sort.StringSlice(xs))) to alter the behaviour of a function like sort.Sort?

I haven’t run into any so far.