Re: on package naming, should the word "_pkg" be part of it?

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

On 8 Oct 2001, Stephen Leake wrote:
[... snip lots of things from Stephen I agree with ...]
> Yes, _T is a good choice. I'm not entirely sure why I originally chose
> _Type instead of _T. At this point, there are many in the Ada comunity
> that use _Type; I don't know of any that use _T. So _Type wins.

I experimented with a style like this for a while, and it works fine.
Also, if you accept the hypothesis that there is typically just one main
type per module (yeah, I know, an Eiffelesque hypothesis) you can just use
"T" for the type and use qualified names so that the package name provides
the meaningful part.

This kind of style is used in some Modula-3 libraries I've seen, and
somewhat in (OCa)ML.

[... snip ...]

> As I said in another post, you can come up with alternate solutions to
> any particular instance of _Type. But _Type is the simplest one that works
> _everywhere_. It's nice to have one naming convention, rather than several.

Exactly, and the reason, as you point out below, is that types and objects
share a namespace, and this convention partitions the namespace.

> Another strong argument here is that you can get used to any style,
> after a while. The exact details of the style matter far less than
> having a consistent style in the first place.

In fact, I wouldn't want to work with someone who wasn't stylistically
labile. I've already spent too much time with other C programmers who got
all fanatical about brace placement. It seems that the amount of vehemence
about programming language issues is inversely proportional to their
importance :-).

-- Brian