Joerg, thank you for looking into this - fixing typos and style issues in other peoples code is really quite a gruelling task.
And trying to get agreement on style issues in a community of developers is virtually impossible, isn't it :-), as we all have our own likes and dislikes. On Fri, 9 Sep 2005 07:55 am, J.Pietschmann wrote: > Hi devs, > while examining the Checkstyle and JavaDoc complaints I > got a few more questions about the FOP style: > 1. There is still quite a bit of hungarian notation here and > there. Hungarian notation generally sucks unless it is > consistently applied. Furthermore, it is systems hungarian > (see http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Wrong.html), > which unconditionally sucks. > And yes, we do already have an "int bFooFlag". > I'd like to exterminate this. +1 I am with you here - allthough I am guilty as well: If I find a class written in hungarian style and I have to make a modification I will sick with the style of the original author. What I dislike most is mixing styles as this make code IMO very difficult to read. > 2. There are two different styles for constructors and setters > in use: > Constructor(int foo) { > this.foo=foo > } > and > Constructor(int f) { > foo=f > } > We should standardize on one form. I'd like the first because > the second may have the undesirable effect of using unintuitive > abbreviations or alternative names for the parameter. > I told Checkstyle laready to accept the first form (there are > *lots* of warnings about it). Unfortunately, Checkstyle can't yet > enforce it. Doesn't worry me too much although I prefer the style you prefer as well. > 3. We have too much weird abbreviations everywhere. In particular, > usage of abbreviations is wildly inconsistent. I'd like to > remind everyone that using proper words to compose identifiers > has advantages. With the autocompletion features of modern IDEs, > long identifiers shouldn't impair typing too much. > I'll probably expand randomly choosen names in the future, which > may include class names. Tell me now if you don't like this. > That's a difficult one - I don't think there is a "right or wrong" here. And yes consistency would be great (e.g. all layout manager classes should be called ...LayoutManager and not some ...LM). I agree that this is not really a typing issue but it is arguable at what length an identifier actually gets in the way of readability, e.g. is 'lineStartBorderAndPaddingWidth' preferable to 'lineStartBAP' if that variable is used a lot in expressions which are then split over multi lines everywhere this variable is used? What about a WIKI page listing commonly used abbreviations found in the code base? So +1 for consistent class names and +1 for consistent and considered use of abbreviations but please don't ban them altogether. > Regards > J.Pietschmann Thanks again for taking this on Manuel
