On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Steven D'Aprano <st...@remove-this-cybersource.com.au> wrote: > On Fri, 05 Feb 2010 12:26:38 -0800, Chris Rebert wrote: >> On Fri, Feb 5, 2010 at 11:53 AM, Wanderer <wande...@dialup4less.com> >> wrote: >>> Which is the more accepted way to compose method names nounVerb or >>> verbNoun? >>> >>> For example voltageGet or getVoltage? getVoltage sounds more normal, >>> but voltageGet is more like voltage.Get. I seem to mix them and I >>> should probably pick one way and stick with it. >> >> Use properties[1] and just call it `voltage`. Python is not Java [2]; >> explicit getters/setters are unpythonic. > > But sometimes you still need methods or functions of the form verb_noun.
True, but when the verb is "get" and you're using Python, your design probably merits another going-over. If the OP hadn't used "get" as their example, I would have answered significantly differently. > For instance, if getting or setting the voltage is an expensive > operation, you don't want to fool the user into thinking it is a cheap > attribute access. I strongly disagree with this rationale as it violates the Uniform Access Principle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_access_principle). Though I concede Python's builtins don't adhere to the UAP. > Or get_voltage might be a stand-alone function rather > than a method. The OP originally said quite explicitly it was a method in their original post. (Though they since wisely changed their code structure so it's not.) > Or the getter might allow additional arguments. True; but before the OP posted the actual function body, there was no way to know whether it did. Lacking such info, I assumed the simplest and most frequent case, namely that it didn't take any args. > The admonition to avoid getters and setters isn't meant to prohibit *any* > method which has a get/set in the name (whether implicit or explicit). > It's meant as an antidote to the Java idiom of making *every* attribute > private and accessing them via getters/setters, even when all they do is > merely get/set the contents of the attribute. True. Again, before the OP posted the method body, there was no way to know it wasn't a trivial Java-esque getter. Cheers, Chris -- http://blog.rebertia.com -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
