Naming things in Phobos - std.algorithm and writefln

[Michel Fortin]

On 2009-08-05 03:49:34 -0400, Robert Fraser <fraserofthenight at gmail.com> said:

> Michel Fortin wrote:
>> As you know, I tried to write some guidelines[1] for naming things in 
>> D. Those guidelines looks well at first glance, but then you look at 
>> Phobos and you see that half of it use some arbitrary naming rules. 
>> Take "writefln" for instance: following my guidelines (as they are 
>> currently written) it should be renamed to something like 
>> "writeFormattedLine".
>> 
>> [1]: http://prowiki.org/wiki4d/wiki.cgi?DProgrammingGuidelines>
> 
> I think naming guidelines aren't a bad thing, but they can be taken too 
> far. We use an automated tool at work to check code and today I was 
> forced to change the name of some classes because they ended in "Queue" 
> or "Dictionary" and "fix the spelling" of "Http" because it thought it 
> was Hungarian notation.

That's indeed ridiculous. But that's not an example of guidelines gone 
too far, that's an example of a silly tool that's not even able to 
apply guidelines correctly.

The guidelines I wrote are human-verifiable, not machine verifiable, 
and sometime require judgement. Exceptions to the guidelines are fine, 
as long as they have a good rationale supporting them.

Even better than making exceptions to the guidelines is creating 
standardized patterns and adding it to the guideline. as I did with 
"to" functions (they don't start with a verb like the guideline says, 
but they are used as a convention for convertion functions).

-- 
Michel Fortin
michel.fortin at michelf.com
http://michelf.com/