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

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

Robert Eachus said

<<   Incidently, and here I am willing to be counted as an extremist,
often the right solution to use cause induced conflicts is to put the
use clauses where needed, rather than in the context clause.  If you
have 20 operations on an ADT, two of which use Text_IO, put a with
Text_IO in the context clause for the body, but put the use clauses in
the IO operations.>>


But you are talking in generalities, responding to my very specific
example. You cannot seriously be suggesting that in the GNAT sources,
for the hundreds, even thousands, of references to Parent, that we
put a use clause in for each of them, and anyway, I don't even see
that putting a use clause in is relevant in this case. Your only
proferred solution that seems to work is

    Parent : constant Node_Id := Nlists.Parent (Other_Node);

But I find the Nlists. here all over the place to be nasty noise, and of
course you cannot eliminate this Nlists. with a use clause, since then
you have the name conflict.

Please note that this is no big deal. Very often we are talking about
tiny routines where

   P : constant Node_Id := Parent (Other_Node);

is quite fine. As many people have noted, short variable names, even one
letter names, are quite fine if they are very local.