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

[john.mccabe@emrad.com.nospam (John McCabe)]

On Thu, 4 Oct 2001 16:53:56 -0400, "Marin David Condic"
<dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> wrote:

>My general opinion is that if a project adopts a naming convention, everyone
>should strive to preserve it for the sake of consistency - no matter how
>stupid a convention it may be.

I agree, but it is obviously worth coming to some agreement on a
convention that is not stupid in the first place.

There is an article available somewhere on the net about Lessons
Learned using Ada 95 in an OO Environment. It suggests things like, if
you're using a package with a single tagged type as a kind of class,
then name the package after its purpose and name the tagged type
Object! So you get something like:

package Car is

    type Object is tagged
        record
            ....
        end record;

    procedure DoSomething (This : in Object);
    ....
end Car;

In my last Ada position we found a large number of cases where this
was just not sensible. Finally our agreement was to use the package
name as the plural of the type of information it contained. So we
would have:

package Cars is

    type Car is tagged
        record
            ....
        end record;

    procedure DoSomething (This : in Car);
    ....
end Cars;

This generally worked pretty well, but we sometimes had some silly
names for packages because of strange pluralisations on words like
Radius etc!

As far as _Type is concerned - I'm all for it, but it can be avoided
by using The_ in front of objects. For example:

   type Car_Type is
       record
          ....
       end record;

   procedure DoSomething (Car : in out Car_Type);

could be replaced by:

   type Car is
       record
          ....
       end record;

   procedure DoSomething (The_Car : in out Car);

At the end of the day, as long as everyone is reasonably happy with
whatever convention is decided on, *and follows it*, then there
shouldn't be a problem.

John