Re: Beginners question: Compound types, how-to?

[Adam Beneschan <adam@irvine.com>]

On Nov 1, 12:19 pm, Jeffrey Carter
<spam.jrcarter....@spam.not.acm.org> wrote:
> On 11/01/2010 10:06 AM, Mart van de Wege wrote:
>
> > Shark8<onewingedsh...@gmail.com>  writes:
>
> >> You could have appended "_Type" to the type declaration giving
> >> "Character_Type."
> >> This gives the added advantage of allowing your parameters to be
> >> highly descriptive, especially if you use named-association when
> >> calling the parameters.
>
> > That's another way around it. Nice. Thanks.
>
> No, not nice. Terrible.
>
> "_Type" is just noise; you could use "_Global_Nuclear_Warfare" just as well. You
> should never be adding unnecessary noise to your code.
>
> S/W engineering involves putting in the effort to think of good names for
> everything in your code. "_Type" is a kludge to avoid doing that thinking.
>
> In this case, the type defines the information for dealing with a Character, so
> I'd probably use Character_Info as the type name.

I kind of like the idea of coming up with a synonym instead.  The word
"Character" is just used *too* commonly in programming, regardless of
the programming language, to refer to a small piece of data that
usually represents a single letter in some language, digit,
punctuation mark, or other special symbol.  Using this name, or any
variant of it (like Character_Type or Character_Info), for some other
meaning (like a character in a play) is IMHO just going to confuse
things for other programmers trying to read your code.

Of course, if you're the only one who's ever going to read your code,
you can call it any bloody thing you like, like Ch or CXRQS or
Global_Nuclear_Warfare (although the last would be appropriate only if
your Character is played by Matthew Broderick....)

                              -- Adam