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

["Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com>]

On Nov 2, 3:02 pm, Jeffrey Carter <spam.jrcarter....@spam.not.acm.org>
wrote:

> > _Type vs "waste time thinking up other names" is a religious argument
> > (guess which side I'm on?); it has never been settled before, and won't
> > be settled this time.
>
> Those who think the essential S/W-engineering activity of choosing good names is
> a waste of time are clearly not S/W engineers.

I guess I will jump into this discussion with my thoughts on the _Type
suffix. In my view it is not noise. It is useful. It conveys the
information that the name in question is the name of a type. That
information is valuable.

The problem is that many words in ordinary English can be used as type
names identifying an entire class of objects, or as an individual
object. For example the word "Weapon" that was used in some other
posts. In some contexts "Weapon" refers to a type... the class of all
weapons. On other contexts "Weapon" refers to a specific weapon at
hand. In normal English the context is set up by the surrounding text
and by the semantics of the sentence in which the words appear. That
works. That can even work in a programming language where a name is
"obviously" the name of a type when it is used in certain ways.

However, when it comes to programming... even software engineering...
I tend to prefer redundancy and explicitness. I like Ada (over some
other languages) precisely because it is redundant and explicit. Thus
I like the name of a type to clearly indicate that it is a type name.
Using the _Type suffix does that nicely.

That said, I don't use _Type universally. There are some names where
it just does not seem necessary. Integer is a good example. It's a
judgement call about which names are good without _Type and which are
not. However, I most definitely do not think _Type is "just noise."

Peter