[LLVMdev] RFC: variable names

[Richard Smith]

On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 4:14 PM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com>
wrote:

>
> On Mon, Oct 13, 2014 at 4:08 PM, Richard Smith <richard at metafoo.co.uk>
> wrote:
>
>> I think this would be bad:
>>
>>   function();
>>   lambda();
>>   longFunction();
>>   long_lambda();
>>
>> ... but possibly not in practice, since function names rarely have only
>> one word.
>>
>> A partial-camel-case, partly-underscores convention sounds strange to me.
>> (I don't find this to be problematic for BIG_SCARY_MACROS and for
>> ABCK_EnumNamespaces because the former are rare and in the latter case the
>> underscore isn't a word separator, it's a namespace separator.) We have a
>> few people here who are used to such a style (since it's what the Google
>> style guide and derivatives uses); any useful feedback from that experience?
>>
>
> This has never come up as a practical problem in my time at Google. Or at
> least, if it has, it was so rare and long ago that I can't remember it. I
> don't expect it to be a problem in practice. Mostly that is because all of
> the problematic cases have two words in them, with one of the words often
> being "is" or a related obvious verb like "get", "create", etc.
>

Thanks, that's really helpful to know.

Some arguments against the change as proposed:
>>
>> 1. Initialisms. It's common in Clang code (also in LLVM?) to use
>> initialisms as variable names. This doesn't really seem to work for names
>> that start with a lower case letter.
>>
>
> I think wee at least need a good answer to this.
>

OK; I think if we have a good answer to this, then either variableName or
variable_name works for me (though I still weakly prefer the former).
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