On 6/10/13 3:13 AM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
On 2013-06-10 04:33, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
Guys, they're function local vars. A comment would suffice.
That doesn't mean the names should be less understandable. We're writing
open source here. I think most names should be named as if they were
part of the public API.
That's an exaggeration. There are plenty of obscure details that help
implementers but would be unnecessary to publish with the API.
It also depends on in what context they are used. Example, in DMD there
are a lot of functions containing probably more the 500 lines of code
with variable names with only one letter, declared at the top of the
function. If you instead have a function with only five or ten lines of
code it could be ok:
private void foo (ProductInformation pi) { // five lines of code }
I would think the above would be ok. But it should definitely not be
used in documentation/examples as I see it is now.
BTW, I hate using comments for that. Comments should basically only be
used for writing API documentation. Most times, if you want to add a
comment your code is probably not clear enough.
A lot of scientific code would be worse off if it used long variable
names. Oftentimes it uses "tau" or "gamma" or even "a" or "k" with an
explanatory comment at the top.
Andrei
