Re: Types, packages & objects : the good old naming conventions question (without religious ware)

["Hibou57 (Yannick Duchêne)" <yannick_duchene@yahoo.fr>]

On 30 déc 2009, 10:31, Georg Bauhaus <rm-
host.bauh...@maps.futureapps.de> wrote:
> Are you certain that the removal of abstraction---by adding
> type properties to object names---will help when trying to
> understand a program?  It might rather give the quick reader
> the impression of understanding the program from just a look
> at the objects' names, I think.  An illusion, most likely,
> for how could you make meaningful changes to a program by
> knowing just little things like "this is a tagged type" from
> looking at object names?

On 31 déc 2009, 14:48, Marco <prenom_no...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> I agree - for code to be reusable in the long run it should have some
> level of abstraction - specification distinguished from implementation
> including public types
>
>   adding awful "Hungarian" names does not help Ada

You are both right, this would be too much, just because the added
value is below the level of the added noise.

Doing too much does not help to a convention to gain audiance.

Just a comment “ tout-de-même ” :

On 31 déc 2009, 14:48, Marco <prenom_no...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>   adding awful "Hungarian" names does not help Ada
This never had anything to deal with the Hungarian notation, which
recalls type information in instance names. This mostly has to deal
with the determination of a name which cleanly match and express the
role of an entity. Types does not play the same role as instances
does, and moreover (and the biggest point) as previously pointed,
there is in Ada, no separate name spaces for type names and instance
names.

As I'm there, here is the opportunity to introduce another usage
case : there is a another trick similar to the one of type-name
against instance-name which I oftenly encounter : a constant or a
variable whose most obvious name would be the same as a function,
which by the way, is in most of case used to initialize it. To have a
legal source is much more easy than to have a beautiful source, and
although — providing a function F exist — if I would like to name a
variable F which would be initialized with something returned from F,
using F_Value for the variable name or Get_F for the function name, in
the sole purpose to avoid a naming clash, ends up in a legal source,
but not a pretty-beautiful source.

Packaging and package name prefix may help here (coming with a name
space), but only when there are other good reasons to have this
package.

Well, if F is a variable, this can be declared, and later initialized
in a named block instead of from a function (although it seems less
clean to me). But what about when F is an initialized constant ? I do
not know any nice way (not an Ada flaw, as legal Ada source allows to
do what is to be done as specified, just a matter of aesthetic — which
in turns influence the feeling of readability).