Re: Convention for naming of packages

[Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de>]

On 15.02.12 07:13, Niklas Holsti wrote:

> I tend to use the first letter of the array or type identifier:
> 
>    for E in Events_Type loop
>       for L in Event_Description(E).Lines'Range loop
>          Print (Event_Description(E).Lines(L)));
>       end loop;
>    end loop;

In a nested loop, I found it helps (me) if at least one of the loop
variables has a meaningful name (with "meaningful" to be defined in a
moment). There is one exception. In cases like matrix computations,
single letter variables are justified by readers' expectations, they
are thus meaningful identifiers (which gives a definition of
"meaningful").  This choice of identifiers happens to match Python
(pylint) conventions,


    for row in data:
        if any (non_zero (c) for c in row):
            result.append (sum (row))


The corresponding Ada, if using arrays, will IMHO warrant the
replacement of identifier "c" with a word, since the two occurrences
of C will look oddly out of style in Ada. (Before Ada 2012, there was
no syntactical notion of an iterator like that of current Python,
so the loops look more involved.) It doesn't hurt (me) that Col is
reminiscent of the full word "column"; the abbreviation seemed an
established convention, and, therefore

    for Row in Data'Range loop
       for Col in Data(Row)'Range loop
          if Non_Zero (Data(Row)(Col)) then
             Result.Append (Sum (Data (Row)));
             exit;
          end if;
       end loop;
    end loop;

When I wrote this using R in place of Row, and C in place of Col,
something odd happened. R made me think of "resistance"!
And this disturbing phenomenon, recursively, made me wonder about C ...

The arguments in favor of words in Ada hinge on the validity
of having readers' expectations guide the choice of identifiers.
The set of readers includes, admittedly, oneself.