Re: help with naming convention

[Dimiter 'malkia' Stanev <malkia@...>]

A lot of the Glib libraries get written this way.

I'm using cairo graphics and pixman right now, and they all start with 
cairo_, and pixman_.

Your example is kind of like SDL, it starts with SDL_, and SDL being 
made of formerly game programmers, probably influenced by quake naming 
CL_xx (for client side stuff), SV_xxx (for server side game logic), 
G_xxx (for sharing), R_xxx (for rendering), etc.

Lastly you have glXxx, glutXxxx, glfwXxxx, clXxxx (OpenCL), etc.

But one thing that I've never quite got was C++ namespaces - mainly 
because they are not "searchable" with simple mechanism. They are only 
searchable if the code is "linked" e.g. knows about each other, and this 
is usually only done after compiling step, or some very special 
heuristic code browser.

Before coming with a name prefix, look at your functions, then just 
google it - if you find related - then choose - either use the same 
name, or if the library is too popular and orthogonal to yours, then it 
might be used in the same linkage with yours, so you better use other name.

For example there was no need to come up with new "gl" extension for 
OpenGL ES2 as normally you don't link OpenGL ES2 with OpenGL (rarely 
it's need, but I had a case where that was needed).

Naming is the hardest simple thing one has to do :)

Not only your functions, but your children too!

On 10/13/2011 5:47 AM, Patrick Mc(avery wrote:
> Thanks Dirk, Xavier, Sean, Peter and Petite Abeille
>
> Based on feedback, I am thinking of a new scheme:
>
> Drop the caps, they are indeed ugly and anything that is reminiscent of
> Windows has to go
> GPIB_talk -> gpib_talk
>
> I like the idea of truncating over the randomness of attempts to
> represent full words with less letters. I like the idea of prefixing
> names from the library code they were called from(although my previous
> examples did not obey this) but a single truncating value might not work.
>
> What about this?(again fictitious names)
>
> #include "kernel1"
> k_dup
> k_drop
>
> #include "gpib4"
> gpib_16_talk
>
>
> The number that the include file ends in would match the truncation of
> characters in it's variable name prefixes. I should also mention that I
> am planning on writing a large number of tiny functions(perhaps 1000) so
> this naming convention issue is quite import to keep order.
>
> As Dirk had mentioned, I could rework a syntax highlighting file, in
> this case to match prefixes before the underscore.
>
> Thanks for the link too, P.A, I am guilty as charged on several of these!
>
> --Patrick