On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 16:12 Jens Mueller wrote: > Jonathan M Davis wrote: > > On Wednesday, September 14, 2011 15:36 dsimcha wrote: > > > On 9/14/2011 5:24 PM, Vladimir Panteleev wrote: > > > > Tiny nitpick: case of "GC" in type/enum names should probably match > > > > for consistency. > > > > > > Good point. Do we even have a convention for acronyms in variable/type > > > names? If so is it GcAllocator or GCAllocator? > > > > We haven't been entirely consistent. For instance, we have UtfException, > > but _every_ other case of utf in the code is either utf (at the > > beginning of a function) or UTF (I have a pull request which includes > > fixing the casing on UtfException to match everything else). Given the > > choice, I'd definitely say that GC should be used and not Gc, and > > everywhere in Phobos where I've created a function which had an acronym > > in it, that's what I've done, but without going through the whole code > > base, I don't know which convention is more common (other than the case > > of Utf where I did go looking; it's easier when you know what the > > acronym is rather than looking for _all_ acronyms). I don't think that > > acronyms have been all that common in general though. > > When I had first glance at GCAllocator I observed this as well. I > believe GcAlloctor is the better way to camelize it even though druntime > has a class GC. It's easier to read for me, consider XMLToHTMLConverter > vs. XmlToHtmlConverter or worse XMLHTMLConverter vs. XmlHtmlConverter. > See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1176950/acronyms-in-camel-back
Actually, I find XMLToHTMLConverter to be more legible than XmlToHtmlConverter, because XML and HTML are pretty much always capitalized everywhere else, and so Xml and Html are unfamiliar and jarring. Acronyms are meant to be capitalized. So, the natural thing to do is to put them in all caps in camelcased names. The problem is that you then end up with stuff like XMLTo where the first part of the next word in the name is capitalized but isn't part of the acronym, which is a bit funny. It's completely consistent and legible that way though. There's no confusion over whether the T is part of XML or not. It's just arguably a bit ugly. But _not_ capitalizing acronyms is generally far more hideous IMHO and makes them harder to read, because they're pretty much always capitalized everywhere else. - Jonathan M Davis
