Phango - questions

[Bill Baxter]

Sean Kelly wrote:
> Christopher Wright wrote:
>  > This is
>> a stylistic topic that almost no one touches, probably because Tango 
>> conventions seem to be lifted wholesale from Java and that's how Java 
>> does it, but I find it a bit confusing and annoying when I'm reading 
>> someone else's code.
> 
> For member variables, I personally prefix the non-public variables with 
> "m_" and non-public static member variables with "sm_".
> 
>> I would at least prefix private variables with an underscore, if I 
>> were setting the style. But if I want to muck about with Tango's 
>> internals, I can suck it up.
> 
> I avoid leading underscore prefixes because they are reserved for C/C++ 
> standard library use.  It's easiest to just avoid this format entirely 
> than risk the rare chance of a collision.

I used to be a big 'm_' guy, but I recently started using trailing 
underscores for private members.  Started doing that after porting 
OpenMesh from C++, which uses that convention.  I was amazed at how much 
more readable all the code looked with the garbage characters appended 
as a suffix rather than a prefix.  Apparently this style is used some by 
Boost as well as the ACE library.  Trying to find out where it came from 
I ran across a quote from someone saying (in 2004) that it's "the de 
facto cool kids' C++ style".  :-) 
http://discuss.joelonsoftware.com/default.asp?joel.3.49438.14

I asked the original OpenMesh devs about it and one responded that he 
used to be in typography before computer science, and from what he 
learned doing that about how humans read he could say the suffix version 
is definitely going to be more readable.

Just some food for thought.

--bb