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

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

John Volan says

<<"John G. Volan" <johnvolan@sprintmail.com> writes:
...
>I only wish the original designers of Ada83 had clued into this style
>from the start.  I find myself wishing Ada95 looked more like this:

>    Integer   : Integer_Type;
>    Natural   : Natural_Type;
>    Float     : Float_Type;
>    Boolean   : Boolean_Type;
>    Character : Character_Type;
>    String    : String_Type;
>    Duration  : Duration_Type;>>

It really is remkarable how some people can take a good idea, and then
kill it by applying it in a completely blind manner. Assuming (a bit
of a reach) that the above is NOT meant as humour, I really find it
hard to believe that anyone would prefer Integer_Type to Integer.
For the last 40 years, millions of programmers have read billions or
even trillions of lines of code in which we have a firm convention of
using very simple words like int or Integer for simple predefined types.
Why would anyone want to type extra junk in their program to override
this universal convention?

At the same time, I find it quite reasonable to add a suffix of _Type
in cases which are less familiar and where it helps the reader. For
my view of the dividing line look at the GNAT sources. So for example,
universal integers, which are so pervasive, are called Uint, but
on the other hand, we use Line_Number_Type. I do not see for a moment
that changing Uint to Universal_Integer_Type throughout the GNAT sources
would achieve anything except to make the sources a bit harder to read,
and to increase the size of the tar file!

In its blind use-it-all-the-time mode suggested above, I find the _Type
suffix rule to be similar to the horrible encoding rules that some C
coders use.

P.S. The issue of how much to worry about classification of names like
this quite depends on availabilty of tools. If you have a tool (like
GNAT running under EMACS using GNATF to provide xref information) that
allows you to instantantly locate the defining occurrence of a given
identifier (useful Algol-68 term :-) then the balance shifts in favor
of less encoding.

The trouble is that in choosing a name, we are trying to satisfy two needs
at the same time.

  o  Give maximum help to someone looking at the sources for the first
	time who does not know their way around.

  o  Don't generate too much unnecessary noise for someone who *does* know
        their way around the sources.

Obviously familiarity plays a big role. Every Ada programmer knows the
type name Integer, and therefore changing it to Integer_Type would badly
damage the second objective without helping the first objective.

On the other hand, a less familiar type name may suggest giving more weight
to the first objective.