The Great Renaming, Chapter 5: string renaming

[jmid]

Approaching Mount Doom our renaming adventure continues with the string generators.

The current status here is ... large and messy:

Combinator name	QCheck.Gen	QCheck.arbitrary	QCheck2.Gen
string	?gen:char t -> string t	string arbitrary	string t
string_size	?gen:char t -> int t -> string t	-	?gen:char t -> int t -> string t
string_of	char t -> string t	char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	char t -> string t
string_printable	string t	string arbitrary	string t
printable_string	-	string arbitrary	-
string_small	string t	string arbitrary	string t
string_small_of	char t -> string t	char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	char t -> string t
string_gen_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
string_gen	-	char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
small_string	?gen:char t -> string t	string arbitrary	?gen:char t -> string t
string_readable	string t	-	-
string_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
printable_string_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
string_printable_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
small_printable_string	-	string arbitrary	-
string_small_printable	-	string arbitrary	-
numeral_string	-	string arbitrary	-
string_numeral	-	string arbitrary	-
numeral_string_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-
string_numeral_of_size	-	int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	-

Observations:

• Like for bytes, QCheck.Gen.string inconsistently accepts an optional ?gen parameter
• QCheck.string_size is missing for consistency
• There is a ton of inconsistently named combinators - and in particularly in QCheck.arbitrary

To move forward the PR

• adds QCheck.string_size for consistency
• removes the optional gen parameter from QCheck.Gen.string for consistency (API breaking):
• adds QCheck.Gen.string_size_of, QCheck.string_size_of, and QCheck2.Gen.string_size_of for consistency
• deprecates QCheck.Gen.small_string, QCheck.small_string, and QCheck2.small_string
• deprecates an array of badly-named combinators from QCheck:
  • QCheck.string_gen_of_size
  • QCheck.string_gen
  • QCheck.string_of_size
  • QCheck.printable_string
  • QCheck.printable_string_of_size
  • QCheck.string_printable_of_size
  • QCheck.small_printable_string
  • QCheck.string_small_printable
  • QCheck.numeral_string
  • QCheck.string_numeral
  • QCheck.numeral_string_of_size
  • QCheck.string_numeral_of_size

I know the latter is a bit aggressive, but I'd rather spend my cycles maintaining a few well-chosen combinators rather than a combinatorial explosion of combinations that are seldomly used (I checked https://sherlocode.com/).

If we go with this, the result is a small collection of names, consistent with what we will offer for bytes:

Combinator name	QCheck.Gen	QCheck.arbitrary	QCheck2.Gen
string	string t	string arbitrary	string t
string_of	char t -> string t	char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	char t -> string t
string_size	?gen:char t -> int t -> string t	?gen:char Gen.t -> int Gen.t -> string arbitrary	?gen:char t -> int t -> string t
string_size_of	int t -> char t -> string t	int Gen.t -> char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	int t -> char t -> string t
string_small	string t	string arbitrary	string t
string_small_of	char t -> string t	char Gen.t -> string arbitrary	char t -> string t
string_printable	string t	string arbitrary	string t

Like for bytes in #371, this postpones the removal of (now redundant) optional ?gen parameters to string_size to the future 1.0.0 release.