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Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 4:56

Hmm, on my keyboard Caps also need a double keypress Poke tongue | ;-P

Mircea

den2k8812-Dec-22 4:58

den2k88

12-Dec-22 4:58

True that, but one hand remains on the letter portion of the keyboard. I find it easier, also more compact. Though snake_case helps understanding.

GCS/GE d--(d) s-/+ a C+++ U+++ P-- L+@ E-- W+++ N+ o+ K- w+++ O? M-- V? PS+ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5? X R+++ tv-- b+(+++) DI+++ D++ G e++ h--- r+++ y+++* Weapons extension: ma- k++ F+2 X

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

Mircea Neacsu12-Dec-22 5:01

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 5:01

I know I'm not going to win this argument but on my keyboard, underscore is right above the P. I promise I'm not going to continue this argument Laugh | :laugh:

Mircea

trønderen12-Dec-22 6:04

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 6:04

Another reason that made me dislike underscores (the the first one is hardcopy readability): Although you are right about upper case also being a double stroke, both the shift and the letter have identical positions on all keyboards, and you can keep your hands in the same position (as long as you have learned to use your left pinky for the shift key).

If you switch between different keyboards - especially keyboards adapted to different languages - punctuation and special characters such as underscore jumps all over the place. It took a few years to define a Norwegian standard placement for all those new characters that came with PCs, unknown on traditional typewriters, so if I dig up my oldest keyboards, even on Norwegian keyboards, they jump around. Using a Norwegian keyboard at home, a US English one at the office, and sometimes some machinery with its own keyboard layout, can be very frustrating.

Nowadays, on a Norwegian keyboard, underscore is shift-hyphen, the rightmost key in the bottom row, next to right shift. You have to move your right hand three-quarters off the keyboard to hit it. (That also goes for hyphen, even if it is un-shifted.)

Mircea Neacsu12-Dec-22 6:14

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 6:14

trønderen wrote:
to define a Norwegian standard placement for all those new characters

You, guys have too many characters in your language! Just get rid of those! Laugh | :laugh:

(says he, whose mother tongue has 5 extra characters... or 10 if you count the caps form).

Mircea

trønderen12-Dec-22 6:49

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 6:49

You didn't keep your promise ...

raddevus12-Dec-22 5:22

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 5:22

That's actually a very good point.
It's probably just
1. the jarring nature of it (diff from past)
2. all those extra characters (_)

You've really made a great point here though & you've got me thinking. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

jschell12-Dec-22 10:50

jschell

12-Dec-22 10:50

Mircea Neacsu wrote:
Programs should be read as books.

Nope.

I read books.

I work on programs.

Those two are not the same.

I read very fast and I can even skip paragraphs and even pages and still understand the flow even when it is text book.

If I do that when writing a program or reviewing others code (which I do extensively and in detail) problems will be missed.

Mircea Neacsu wrote:
aBookThatIsTypesetInLongWordsAlmostLikeGerman

Flawed example.

The variable name is too long and very likely the logic is flawed since the only need for that would be if the context was so complex (too complex) that it required that.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

Mircea Neacsu12-Dec-22 11:17

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 11:17

jschell wrote:
Those two are not the same.
I read very fast and I can even skip paragraphs and even pages and still understand the flow even when it is text book.
If I do that when writing a program or reviewing others code (which I do extensively and in detail) problems will be missed.

Even if I would agree with your point, which I don't, how is camel case making life better? I fail to see the connection.

My eyes, which have been used since a young age with the beauty and the rhythm of a nicely typeset page, are just offended by the ugliness of camel case. Snake case is slightly better but if someone, one day invents an invisible link, I would gladly switch to that.

Getting back to the issue of programs like books, not that I want to hide behind the authority of others, I think I'm in good company if I remind myself of Knuth's literate programming concept and Hal Abelson's quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute". Anyway, that's at least how I try to practice my trade and, if I have to agonize for the best name for a structure or a method, so be it.

Mircea

jschell13-Dec-22 10:24

jschell

13-Dec-22 10:24

Mircea Neacsu wrote:
how is camel case making life better?

You provided an example which I commented on.

Mircea Neacsu wrote:
My eyes...are just offended by the ugliness of camel case

Which is obviously subjective. In terms of maintaining code neither of the following is objectively better.

int userCount;
int user_count;

Mircea Neacsu wrote:
I remind myself of Knuth's literate programming concept and Hal Abelson's quote: "Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute"

Which was exactly my point when I pointed out that I work on them and review them.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

Greg Utas12-Dec-22 4:56

Greg Utas

12-Dec-22 4:56

Usually PascalCase, but camelCase for member data and locals.

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Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

PIEBALDconsult12-Dec-22 5:12

PIEBALDconsult

12-Dec-22 5:12

I reject the premise of the question.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

raddevus12-Dec-22 5:24

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 5:24

PIEBALDconsult wrote:
I reject the premise of the question.

I like it!!!
It is baseless.
Reminds me of an old great quote:

Benjamin Franklin (the dude on the $100USD bill)
"Your argument is sound! Nothing but sound!"

Mike Hankey12-Dec-22 5:20

Mike Hankey

12-Dec-22 5:20

In[Case]

PartsBin an Electronics Part Organizer - An updated version available!
JaxCoder.com

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

Ron Anders12-Dec-22 5:32

Ron Anders

12-Dec-22 5:32

PascaleCase

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

trønderen12-Dec-22 5:35

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 5:35

In my first 10-15 years of programming, hardcopy printouts were still common. Both my university and my first employer used a printer model placing the underscore so low that it almost hit the top of the characters on the line below; you certainly didn't see it as tying two characters together. In a listing, a name with underscores looked like several space separated words. For variables starting / ending with an underscore, the underscore was easily overlooked. This could at times be really confusing. So I came to strongly dislike underscores in identifiers.

If you really wanted to underscore a text line for emphasis, like in a header, these printers were fine - they didn't clutter up the text. Other printers, placing the underscore at the character baseline, were not suitable for underscoring. E.g. an underscored h would be very similar to a b, an underscored n was close to an o. So for emphasizing text, our printers were great, but not for underscore used as a printable character in an identifier.

raddevus12-Dec-22 7:17

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 7:17

Great point about printers and the challenges of underscores. Thanks for sharing.

This is also the reason we used to like Hungarian notation so much back then too.
We did "offline" code reviews where we sat around a table and looked at code print-outs.
Hungarian made sense because you could be a couple pages down and still know the type without looking back up at the declaration. Thumbs Up | :thumbsup:

Of course, there was no intellisense back then either so...
These kids don't know what they got!!! Roll eyes | :rolleyes:

jschell12-Dec-22 10:54

jschell

12-Dec-22 10:54

raddevus wrote:
so much back then too.
...you could be a couple pages down and still know the type without looking back up at the declaration

Also when it was less clear that a context that was pages long was probably going to end up being a problem for maintenance no matter what it looked like.

Like an actual C++ class that I worked on that I calculated had 20,000 lines of code, hundreds of variables and hundreds of methods. It also spanned multiple files. I might not have even found all of the files.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

trønderen12-Dec-22 11:52

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 11:52

raddevus wrote:
Hungarian made sense because you could be a couple pages down and still know the type without looking back up at the declaration.

A couple of pages? The biggest type declaration I have been almost in touch with (I was offered an opportunity to see it, but declined Smile | :)

) was about 8300 lines long. 72 lines per page makes a 120 page book for that declaration alone.

For the curious ones: The type declaration appeared in the CHILL source code of the System 12 telephone switch, when the very first software version was being prepared. My guess is that it grew considerably further throughout the lifetime of System 12. It defined a message format, with variant fields for different function codes all embedded in a single type declaration, 'to have it all in one place'. The number of codes / variants most likely grew in later releases.

honey the codewitch12-Dec-22 5:38

honey the codewitch

12-Dec-22 5:38

I use pascal case in .NET, camel case in JS, and snake case in my libraries in C++.

To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

raddevus12-Dec-22 7:18

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

12-Dec-22 7:18

wow! you use snake_case in C++?
I only use snake_case in Rust bec I'm forced to. (oldish c/c++ dev here).

honey the codewitch12-Dec-22 7:19

honey the codewitch

12-Dec-22 7:19

particularly for my libraries. I also tend to make heavy use of Generic Programming and thus templates, and so my libraries tend to be very STLish as it is. Consequently, I tend to follow STL patterns.

To err is human. Fortune favors the monsters.

Re: I'll see your curly braces & raise you a variable naming convention

raddevus12-Dec-22 7:30