Re: Long Constant Names

[Barbara Morris <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>]

antoine.contal@xxxxxxx wrote:
> 
> I'm having an argument with the team that choose our shop's coding style 
> conventions. I'd like to have your opinion on the subject.
> 
> The heart of the matter lies in this kind of constant declaration:
> 
> DwwAppStateUpdFailMsg...
> D                 C                   '...'
> 
> (ww is a prefix we have to add in front of variables and constants, to 
> differentiate them from file fields)
> 
> The convention team says this name is too long. They want everybody to keep 
> their names within the 15-character limit -- indeed, 13 meaningful characters 
> after you add the two-character prefix.
> ...

Is the convention team trying to prevent the use of ... in names, or
just to keep name-lengths 15 or less?  If the rule is against the ...,
then what about name indentation?  If you use indentation to show the
organization of a data structure, you have even fewer characters for the
names.

I think the rule should be that names should be as terse as possible
while retaining enough information to make them easily remembered.  A
good set of abbreviations (like Msg, Upd etc) should be established, so
you don't get names like wwApplicationStateUpdateFailMessage, or two
too-similar names like wwHaveRec and wwHaveRcd.

Aside: A few times I've been unable to come up with a good name for a
variable; it's usually turned out that it was better to do my coding a
completely different way.  My Rule of Thumb: If you can't name the
variable, try rethinking the algorithm.