Re: Warning: Religious naming convention discussion :-) [was: assign help!!]

["John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com>]

Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> 
> Since taking on the learning of Ada95, I have adopted the old Pascal style
> convention of prefixing 'a' to a capitalized type name: aTree, aList,
> aStack, etc.

Except that Ada is case-insensitive, so this should really be "A_Tree",
"A_List", "A_Stack".  By the way, would it be "An_Airplane" and
"An_Item"?

Personally, I don't quite like those as names for types.  When you do
something like this:

>    List : aList;

I think you're trying to cater too much to the "readability AS English"
school of thought: "List is a list".  I prefer "List_Type" for a list
type, because that's what the thing is: a list _type_.  Not actually "a
list" itself.

> Incidentally, the only reason I
> would use such suffixes is to spare the fundamental type name for use
> as a variable, e.g.

Precisely the goal I had in mind, and yes, your scheme would satisfy my
criterion that the naming convention be minimalistic and mechanical. I'd
just prefer calling a type what it _is_: a "_Type".

> Other than that, I'm opposed to elaborate suffix or prefix schemes:
> that Hungarian Notation thiing is a pet peeve!

I agree that HN is distasteful. It uses cryptic abbreviations -- but
that's endemic in C culture anyway. And it obsesses over the detailed
machine representation of things -- but that's the fault of the C
language itself, what with all the weaknesses in the type system.  I
mean, when you have implicit coercions, ambiguity between pointers and
arays, sentinel values marking the ends of characters strings instead of
attribute dope, it's no wonder you'd have to obsess about implementation
details.

I will give Micro$oft this much credit, however: They seem to apply HN
thoroughly and consistently, and _any_ naming convention, if applied
consistently, cannot help but enhance readability, once a sufficient
number of worker drones^H^H^H^H^H^H ahem, engineers have been
indoctrinated^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H ahem, become familiarized with it.

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