From mboxrd@z Thu Jan  1 00:00:00 1970
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me
X-Spam-Level: 
X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID
	autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4
X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit
X-Google-Thread: 103376,2078dddcdcd8d83
X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public
From: clines@delete_this.airmail.net (Kevin Cline)
Subject: Re: Warning: Religious naming convention discussion :-) [was: assign
 help!!]
Date: 1997/05/09
Message-ID: 
 <2B7896AAF5813C74.8F68EC25E241D79E.597694DA2A962A51@library-proxy.airnews.net>#1/1
X-Deja-AN: 240384228
References: <5kjvcv$evt@news.cis.nctu.edu.tw> <5kn8ko$jcc@top.mitre.org>
 <1997May7.201035.2439@nosc.mil> <33727EEA.2092@sprintmail.com>
X-Orig-Message-ID: <3375af5f.2479863@news.airmail.net>
Organization: INTERNET AMERICA
NNTP-Proxy-Relay: library.airnews.net
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-09T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>


"John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com> wrote:
>Charles H. Sampson wrote:
>
>I have now come around to accept Norman Cohen's approach: An unmarked
>noun should be reserved for an object, e.g.:
>"Target.Location.Latitude".  The name of the type should be the one that
>gets marked, and what better universal marker for "typeness" than
>"_Type"?  e.g.:
>
>	Target   : Target_Type;
>	Location : Location_Type;
>	Latitude : Latitude_Type;
>

Absolutely agree.  After I switched from C to Ada, and could no longer use
case to distinguish between instances and types, I looked at a lot of code,
including Booch's original Ada components, before settling on the _type
suffix, for all of the reasons Charles gave.  Reading code like:

    The_Node.Left := Into_The_Tree.Root 

gave me a headache.

It's hard to solve this problem in any way similar to natural language because
natural languages (at least all the ones that I'm familiar with) use the same
word for both a category and an instance of the category, relying on the
context to disambiguate.