On 1/14/22 3:29 PM, Ján Tomko wrote:
On a Friday in 2022, Laine Stump wrote:
Since it's Friday and we're talking about personal preferences - I personally dislike the use of i and j (and anything else with a single letter) as variable names, because it makes using a text search for occurences pointless. Sure, longer variable names could also be a substring of something else, and any variable could be re-used elsewhere, but even then a search is mildly usable.

Well, you need to search for the word i instead of the letter i.

grep has the '-w' switch for that, or you can specify some boundaries:
    \bi\b
    \<i\>

vim searches for the word under the cursor with '*' by default

Surely other search tools have some equivalent.

This forced me to go look for it in emacs, and after 28 years, I've learned about isearch-forward-symbol-at-point, which is by default bound to [alt-s .]. But that's just another different keystroke I have to remember. Much easier if I can just use an expansion of the ctl-s (incremental search) that I already know and use for pretty much all searching within a single file.



(On the other hand, sometimes a loop is just a loop and it takes too much brain capacity to think of a meaningful name for the index. I used to work with someone who always used "ii" and "jj" for generic loop indexes because they were then easy to search for with few false positives (well - "ascii", "skiing", and a surprisingly high number of other more obscure words, but still...) , and I internalized that practice myself. After having libvirt patches with that rejected a couple times, I unlearned and conformed to the hive :-))

II thank you.

JJano

KKind of you,

LLaine

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