RE: Long Constant Names

["Francis Lapeyre" <flapeyre@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Barbara:

For example - we are on V5R1 (and have to stay there until some major apps
that use the QDLS file system get rewritten), so using %DEC to convert
strings to numeric is not yet an option for us. I found your GetNum function
in Usenet. It's been very useful. But with our naming conventions, it's
called ArvString_Getnum, and that has to be split over two lines with an
ellipsis. But it's useful, albeit a bit long, because I know instantly which
/copy member I need to put in (/Copy QCPYLESRC,ARVSTRING).

Francis Lapeyre
IS Dept. Programmer/Analyst
Stewart Enterprises, Inc.
E-mail: flapeyre (at) stei (dot) com 



-----Original Message-----
From: rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:rpg400-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
On Behalf Of Barbara Morris
Sent: Wednesday, December 29, 2004 1:41 PM
To: rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: Long Constant Names

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.

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