[BSL] Would it be considered bad practice to name custom function with the same pattern as selectors?

Questions & Answers
1

I'm reading How to Design Programs.
This question is about the Beginning Student Language.

Doing the exercise of the Graphical Editor, we define an structure like this:

(define-struct editor [pre post])

Which implies the following selectors:

  • editor-pre
  • editor-post

So I was attempting to do the exersice 87 where basically we have to repeat the development of the graphical editor.

The new structure is:

(define-struct editor [text cursor])

So we don't have in this case the selectors editor-pre and editor-post, so I could create a function called editor-pre if I want (which is the case :smiley: ).

But I'm wondering if that is bad practice, making it more difficult future extensions to the editor structure, i.e. I couldn't rewrite it easily like:

(define-struct editor [text cursor pre])

(For whatever reason).

2

The point of the exercise is to understand how different choices of data representation affect your programming. Changing the data representation (struct plus interpretation) would defeat the goal.