OpenEuphoria

Re: Aesthetically pleasing identifier names

• Posted by Ed Davis <ed_davis2 at yahoo.com> Mar 07, 2005
• 518 views

Brent W. Hughes wrote:

>When I was a young and tender programmer, if I wanted to declare
>a function to, say, set a menu bar to a certain value, I would
>probably name the function something like "smb" which of course,
>stood for "set menu bar".
>...
>identifier names, and I decided to give that a try.  My function
>would hence be called "set_menu_bar".
>...
>I tried it.  My
>function would now be called "SetMenuBar". I found my code to be
>more readable and much more aesthetically pleasing.  In fact, I
>have become a convert to this way of naming identifiers.
>...
>What do you think?

I've followed a similar path.  In the late 70's I used the smb.
In the 80's I used the set_menu_bar.  In the 90's I went with
SetMenuBar.

Now, since 2000, I've decided that SetMenuBar is ugly, and even
hard to read sometimes, and have gone back to set_menu_bar, which
is much easier for me to read.

For example, look at this function, taken straight from the win32
API:

AddSectionKeyFileToCopyList(szSect, szKey, szSrc, szDest);

vs.

add_section_key_file_to_copy_list(sect, key, src, dst);

It takes me a second to read the first one, but I can immediately
read the 2nd one, as the '_' clearly separates the words.

YMMV, VWP, NW