[Gambas-user] About Gambas naming convention

[Benoît Minisini]

Hi,

I didn't read all the mails, not enough time. :-)

The Gambas naming convention is not really mandatory at all. It comes 
from the way I wrote Visual Basic code when I was using Visual Basic in 
my job, plus the decision to use "$" to make the difference between 
local variables and private static variables.

I didn't even write the wiki page about naming convention.

I think that naming convention is necessary but is mainly a matter of 
personal taste. I use with Gambas some sort of hungarian notation, but 
not at all when writing C, C++ code.

I was thinking why I'm using that convention, what the rational is 
behind it, and here is the result of my thought:

1) The name of a variable tells what is stored inside.

2) Why adding a prefix? To tell how the thing stored in the variable is 
represented: by a number, by a string, by a reference to a Gambas object.

3) Why telling that a variable is an array or a collection? Because 
these data structures are often used for moving from the representation 
of a thing to another representation of the same thing, or a 
representation of another thing. So it's important to notice.

4) Why using specific prefix for controls? No real reason there, it's 
just comes from an old Visual Basic habit.

5) Why not using prefix for global variables? No real reason too, except 
that it's nicer to look like other global symbols like methods or 
properties.

As you see, if you are looking for coherency, you can move on.

It's just easier that code introduced in the Gambas source tree follows 
this convention so that everybody can read the code without having to 
learn ten different naming conventions.

The more important for me, is chosing good names for symbols. Especially 
when they are public. Not too short, not too long, informative enough so 
that commentaries are not needed (this is not always possible, but the 
less comments are needed, the best it is).

Regards,

-- 
Benoît Minisini