Peter, > What's the riposte? Comments lie, especially through entropy. The > compiler takes no notice of any other intention you are encoding in the > name.
I disagree, the analogy is not correct. Comments lie, code shouldn't. I'm not advocating that we write lots of inline comments, in fact quiet the opposite. Comments should be sparse the focus should be on clear intention revealing code. The compiler takes no notice of variable names but I do. I spend a lot of time working with other peoples code, reviewing and optimizing and people spend a lot of time working with mine. Some of the teams I work with have up to 50 engineers. If you don't have clear coding practices then working with the code of an engineer who left the company twelve months ago becomes a nightmare. I believe that it's more important in open source projects as contributors and committers come and go over time and are often distributed across national and language boundries. > >>currentPageNumber = m_pageNumber + 1; So this is significant I can see from this that the local variable currentPageNumber is being assigned to the member variable pageNumber plus one. If I instead had currentPageNumber = pageNumber + 1; I would have to know where currentPageNumber and pageNumber are defined. Are they static variables from an imported class, are they member variables, are they local? All of which is answered in the previous sample. Tools like emacs and vslick edit make the task of finding the definition easier, but you still have to find it you can't simply infer it. Now you might say "but a developer might forget to do it so it's worthless over time", that's where code quality tools like checkstyle come in. They report breaches so they are easily fixed. > Have mercy. I'm just trying to reduce the amount of time it takes for someone to understand the code base. In fact I would like to see things like opening and closing brace position in the coding standards (I have a preference for on a new line but I really don't care as long as it's consistent. I'd also be happy to create jalopy and eclipse code formats for the project once they are established. -k. -- If you don't test then your code is only a collection of bugs which apparently behave like a working program. Website: http://radio.weblogs.com/0111457/ --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
