The topic here isn't so much the order but whether "of" in int_of_string matches a common/typical usage of the word.

From the other comments sounds like its local style for OCaml maybe because of some French lineage, but that "int_of_string" is a function that converts a string into an int was definitely not something that I would have assumed (as opposed to 'int_from_string' or something).

It doesn't sound especially weird to me and I'm not French.

It's just "[create an] int [out] of [a] string"

"from" would have made more sense.

The words in brackets are doing all of the heavy lifting in your example though: "Of" without "out of" means "constituted by". If in isolation I saw "array_of_string" I'd definitely parse that as somehow being about str[], not "f(str) -> char[]"

Well, if the word order is the most important aspect (as it is to me) then you have to think of another word you can use instead of "of". I know that in my early Haskell programming I was writing `intOfString` where other Haskellers wrote `stringToInt`. I'm a native English speaker so it certainly had nothing to do with French! "Of" just seemed to fit naturally there. Do you think "From" or some other English word would be more natural?

The Haskell culture clearly dictates "i = fromString s".

And as a consequence, Rust has it standardized as "i = from s".

What do you do if you want to disambiguate the return type? I suppose `intFromString` works. I'm not sure what I chose `intOfString`. It's not because I'm French!

You would declare the type of the returning value:

(i :: Int) = fromString s

Although once in a while it's useful to make a short synonym for disambiguating the type, x_of_y is certainly not a short synonym, so it's not commonly used.

Better yet, compare

    f = glork_to_floob (crumb_to_glork c)

versus

    f = floob_of_glork (glork_of_crumb c)

and picture the first style inside a more complex function with more constructors/conversions.

Yes, even better example, thanks! In Haskell you get

    f = floob_of_glork . glork_of_crumb . crumb_of_zing

which is much better than

    f = glork_to_floob . crumb_to_glork . zing_to_crumb

Interesting. The pipe operator is more idiomatic in OCaml where this would be

  crumb_of_zing x |> glork_of_crumb |> floob_of_glork

versus

  zing_to_crumb x |> crumb_to_glork |> glork_to_floob

Yeah, fair. Forth especially really commits to that left-to-right order in its general style -- I like it when a language and its culture are conscious about readability in this way.

It is interesting that the "of" style is common in Ocaml where the left-to-right style is common. They seem to clash!

I would like to know what it's like to work in a fully left-to-right language, for example, to define `my_floob`:

      let my_crumb |> zing_to_crumb |> crumb_to_glork |> glork_to_floob = my_floob

In addition to Forth, R can do this too:

  x |> zing_to_crumb() |> crumb_to_glork() |> glork_to_floob() -> my_floob

But it is not idiomatic.