Re: Types, packages & objects : the good old naming conventions question (without religious ware)

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

"Peter C. Chapin" <pcc482719@gmail.com> writes:

> Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org> wrote in 
> news:u4ope4pqa.fsf@stephe-leake.org:
>
>> Yes, but reading is also important. The _Type suffix is essentially
>> noise when reading; it's only there for the compiler, not the human.
>> So you want to read it as few times as possible, as well as write it
>> as few times as possible.
>
> This seems backwards to me. I could use a type name such as X72efY9 for all 
> the compiler cares. The _Type suffix is most definitely for the human. It 
> says, "Hey! This is the name of a type so keep that in mind when looking at 
> this code."

Well, you can read it that way. But the original reason the _Type
convention got started (at least, as far as I'm concerned) is to solve
the problem of overlapping object and type namespaces.

This is illegal:

    procedure (List : in list);

So we have to add noise to either the object or the type, to keep the
compiler happy. That's all there is to it.

> In the past I used _Type as a suffix for all of my types. However, there 
> are times when that doesn't seem to fit. After all the standard types don't 
> (usually) use a _Type suffix (Character, Integer, Positive, Vector, etc). 

The standard is Just Wrong. But we have to live with it.

-- 
-- Stephe