Re: Long Constant Names

Barbara,

Officially, the convention team says it just wants to prevent names with more 
than 15 chars. Yet, I think for some of them, the motivation behind this rule 
is one of aesthetics. They just can't stand the ellipsis and the two-line
declaration. Although it's not pretty, I don't mind it, and I don't understand 
other people's extreme reaction.

You're right about data structure field indentation. We also have a convention 
about it. Logically, if the convention team didn't want to see any ellipsis, 
they would have to reduce the allowed length for them. I think the idea haven't
occurred to them... yet!

> I think the rule should be that names should be as terse as possible
> while retaining enough information to make them easily remembered.

I like this wording. It's more or less what I told them I feel would be right. 
It's funny, but some people can't stand a rule that doesn't have a hard number 
in it.

As a corollary to your last paragraph, I would add that I usually rename my 
variables when I get a better understanding of what my algorithm is really 
doing. Also, every time I feel I need to comment something, I first ask myself 
if I
cannot have better names for my variables that would make the comment shorter 
or completely unnecessary.

Cheers.

--
Antoine CONTAL


                                                                                
                                                       
             Barbara Morris                                                     
                                                       
             <bmorris@xxxxxxxxxx>               Pour :   rpg400-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx  
                                                       
                                                cc :                            
                                                       
                                                Objet :  Re: Long Constant 
Names                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       
                                                                                
                                                       


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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