I was recently watching a talk given by Rich Hickey where he talks about serialization formats and how they can have all their metadata in-band or have to depend on out of band information. The latter situation is where bugs can be introduced.

The example in the original post relies heavily on out of band documentation. Your suggestion of an intention revealing function name puts the same info in-band.

One should always ask themselves: Does my code depend on out of band information? If so, can we correct this?