Yeah, I don’t really like the underscores either. But I have to work
with the set of currently allowed non-alphanumeric symbol characters
(*, +, !, -, _, and ?, according to clojure.org/reader).
There’s actually two different questions here—I’d love for other
people to bring in their input.
I need to set apart “rules”, a certain type of object, from other
kinds of Clojure objects. ("Why do you even need to do this?" people
ask. Because I really want to graphically set them apart in the
programmers mind. And also, rules often shared names with objects that
they were representing: it was difficult to remember string-char-r vs.
string-char in functions, for instance. It was always a big pain. I
think it will be worth it.)
Question 1: Of the allowed characters, which would be best to
distinguish rule symbols from other symbols?
* can be confused with the REPL vars (*1, *e, etc.) and re-bindable
vars.
+ may be a better choice, though in the other Lisps it already
indicates constants.
I don’t think ! and ? are good at all, because they really stand out
to me to mean destruction and querying respectively.
- is apparently used only once in the standard libraries: in defn-.
Maybe it would be a good choice.
_ is ugly, but it’s not used at all, so that’s good. Well, except when
used on its own: “_”, for useless bindings.
I’m leaning toward +, -, or _.
Question 2: Prefix, suffix, or circumfix?
+vector, vector+, or +vector+? -vector, vector-, -vector-? Or
whatever. Don’t forget, I’m deciding this for my parser rules library.
“vector” means a rule that can parse strings representing vectors.
Could everyone give me their opinion? Which annoys your taste the
least? I still have time to change the style in my library, and I’d
like to hear from as many people as possible.
On Feb 25, 3:16 pm, Jarkko Oranen <chous...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Feb 25, 12:17 am, joshua-choi <rbysam...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > When it comes to distinguishing certain types of symbols from other
> > things, should one use prefixes or suffixes?
>
> Whichever makes more sense, of course. :)
>
>
>
> > Example: naming tests with clojure.test/deftest. If you distinguish
> > your tests’ symbols at all, do you do “t-addition” or “addition-t”?
>
> Name tests descriptively. Putting them in their own namespace helps
> too. If there's absolutely a need to distinguish them from non-tests,
> I would prefer '-test'. Abbreviating it just makes it noisy.
>
> > (I need to know what the standard is, if there is any, because I need
> > a way to distinguish a certain type of symbol—those that represent
> > “rules”— in my libraries. I’m using an underscore suffix right now,
> > like “vector_”, which means “vector-rule” But “_rule” might be better,
> > or even “_rule_”, though the last one might be overkill. In the past,
> > I’ve used “vector-r", but I don’t like that now.)
>
> I personally find underscores offensive, but... Some logic DSLs use ?
> foo for variables, maybe you could have something similar for you
> rules. Or you could name them using angled brackets (eg. <vector>).
> When it comes to naming, you just need to be consistent. And avoid
> underscores, please :P
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
Groups "Clojure" group.
To post to this group, send email to clojure@googlegroups.com
Note that posts from new members are moderated - please be patient with your
first post.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
clojure+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/clojure?hl=en
