Re: Two simple language questions (plural types)

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

On Mon, 12 Jan 1998, Matthew Heaney wrote:
> Perhaps I chose a bad example.  I occasionally use a definate article on
> object names, I mostly do not.
> 
> I agree also that one does not require the "_Type" suffix on type names. 
> The designator _Type doesn't add any more value to the name, since it
> appears on the right-hand side of a declaration, and therefore I already
> know it's a type.  But you have to solve the problem of giving objects a
> different name than the type, because they share the same namespace (this
> is not an issue in Eiffel).

If you have a type Color_Type, you can name the variable Color. While you 
can claim that distinguishing types is redundant due to their position, it
is IMO a helpful redundancy. Just remember, to an ML programmer, almost 
all of the type declarations in Ada are redundant :-).

I think separating the namespaces and allowing 

	Color : Color; 

is a bit too much for me, but I suppose Eiffel programmers get used to it 
and so could I. All of this is preference; just remember a few months ago
that people were flaming Michael Feldman for his use of all caps keywords 
in his (otherwise excellent :-) books. 

> In fact, I think the reason the _Type convention is a debate in the Ada
> community is because the file type declared in Text_IO was named
> 
> type File_Type is limited private;
> 
> To me, this is the one thing the designers got wrong, because they're not
> consistant with other declarations in the RM.  The file types should have
> been named

I guess I think all of the type names should have been lexically
distinguished from non-type names, so I think this is an even bigger 
mistake by far than you! While I don't like your naming conventions, I
have to say I admire your approach in trying to come up with a simple set
of rules that retains consistency with the names of the predefined types. 
I definitely prefer your approach to the use of plurals to distinguish
types, but I doubt that a uniform naming convention will be adopted by 
Ada programmers anytime soon.

-- Brian