On 2009-08-05 03:49:34 -0400, Robert Fraser <[email protected]> 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
[email protected]
http://michelf.com/
