Re: Type naming conventions: Any_Foo

["Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.not.acm.org>]

On 12/5/19 8:49 PM, Niklas Holsti wrote:
> 
> Either of those is itself defining a convention. It seems every enumerated type 
> would then get an "_ID" or "_Name" suffix. Or something similar.

Many enumeration types are identifiers or names; some are not. A convention 
would end every enumeration type name with the same suffix, even when it's not 
appropriate. Well chosen type names would perhaps result in many such names 
ending in the same suffix, but not all.

As an example, the PragmAda Reusable Components have 13 lines returned by

grep -i "type  *[a-z0-9_]*  *is  *(" *.ad?

8 of them end in _I[Dd] (I really should make the casing consistent), 1 in 
_Name, and 4 others. Had I used the convention of _ID rather than making the 
effort to think of good names, about 1/3 of those names would be less 
meaningful. Had I used a meaningless convention like _T for all type names, all 
of those names would be less meaningful. Meaningful names are easier to read, 
and ease of reading is an important goal of S/W engineering.

-- 
Jeff Carter
"Ada has made you lazy and careless. You can write programs in C that
are just as safe by the simple application of super-human diligence."
E. Robert Tisdale
72