Phango - questions

[Robert Fraser]

Bill Baxter Wrote:

> 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

Why do private members need to be differentiated typographically?