[LLVMdev] RFC: variable names

Chandler Carruth chandlerc at google.com
Mon Oct 13 16:31:49 PDT 2014


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

> 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.
>

As I really suspect this is the most important point to address, let me
make an attempt:

Variable names are *either* initialisms, written as all caps, or terms
written in lower case and separated by underscores. For the purposes of
variable naming "terms" can include words but also extremely common and
recognizable abbreviations within LLVM such as "rhs", "lhs", or "gep".
These types of terms should not be written as initialisms but as words. For
example, you might write "LE" or "lhs_expr" for the Left-hand Expression,
but not "LHSE" or "LHS_expr".

While I'm trying to avoid it, this has the advantage of leaving a large
number of initialisms in the existing code base as "stylish".


I'm not really happy with this rule, but it is the least disruptive and
most consistent I can come up with. I would also be happy encouraging
people to not use initialisms excessively or if confusing. I think the
current codebase uses them more than is helpful.
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