[LLVMdev] RFC: variable names

[Greg Fitzgerald]

After having read through this long thread, I'm having trouble
spotting a case of someone saying lowerCamelCase variable names is a
bad idea.  Nick's original proposal looks good to me.  What do we need
to do to move forward here?

Thanks,
Greg


On Tue, Oct 14, 2014 at 2:55 PM, Chris Lattner <clattner at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Oct 13, 2014, at 4:31 PM, Chandler Carruth <chandlerc at google.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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.
>
>
> Personally, I’d prefer “initialism” or “lower camel case”.  I’m not sure
> what the problem with lower camel case was?  I don’t see how lambdas are
> confusing here.
>
> -Chris
>
>
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