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From: Martin Dowie <martin.dowie@btopenworld.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada
Subject: Re: Ada Quality and Style book discussion
Date: Wed, 16 Nov 2005 07:03:51 +0000 (UTC)
Organization: BT Openworld
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Date: 2005-11-16T07:03:51+00:00
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Simon Wright wrote:
> Anonymous Coward <spam@spam.com> writes:
> 
> 
>>I also object to the guides comment advising against "Day_Type".
>>It's a very good practice to suffix types with "_Type", "_Record",
>>or "_Array", so it's clear from the identifier what it refers to,
>>and also so you don't hijack a good variable name.  In the above
>>case, "Day" can no longer be used to name an object.
> 
> 
> This is one of the more contentious style arguments. If you work on my
> project, I will insist that you _don't_ stick these useless suffices
> on. And I'm not sure that Day is a good variable name; if it's not
> worth giving it a name which indicates its use, what's wrong with
> plain D? (we were tempted to have a local style guideline that the
> length of a name should be log2(lines of scope)).

I'm with Simon on this one. "Today" or "This_Day" or "The_First_Day" are 
better variable names...

...however, there are times when there are name clashes and (for no good 
reason that I can think of) Ada can't tell the difference between a 
types name and, say, an enumerate.

So, instead of appending the ugly "_Type", I prefer to use the English 
as my inspiration and prefix "A_" or "An_". Types are after all 
"indefinite articles". Objects are "definite articles".

E.g.

    My_New_Saab : A_Car;

Which can be read "My new Saab is a Car".

Cheers

-- Martin