From: Daniel Stenberg <daniel_at_haxx.se>
Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 11:26:57 +0100 (MET)

On Fri, 8 Nov 2002, Stuart Tedford wrote:

> > I've fixed a number of bugs where someone accessed member variables
> > thinking they were local ones. Using m_ prefix makes it very hard to
> > mistake these.

> Yes, I haven't done any commercial c++ development yet, but I can see that
> this "m" prefix would be valuable.

Yes, for C++ or Java, that kind of naming might have a point. Fortunately,
we don't use any of those in Rockbox! ;-)

> I guess it's important to have coding conventions that help us, not simply
> for conventions sake. The best convention is one that applies only the
> useful parts from other conventions.

I can't but agree to this. We can't sheepishly assume that strict conventions
improve the situation for all of us. After all, the people who write the code
should probably have a lot to say about this, and so far in this game, I
can't think of a single problem introduced in the code due to the lack of
prefixes to variable names.

I dislike prefixes a lot. I think they make reading the code a lot harder and
they're annoying when you decide to change type of variables. You've read
Björn saying the same. I believe Linus is on the same playing field.

The importance of prefixes to variable names is mostly overstated and IMHO,
is targeted for environments where lots of programmers are newbies or general
losers (read: in the big bad commercial world we all live and work in on our
real-life jobs).

Lots of *HUGE* and very successful projects have no prefix conventions at
all.

-- 
Daniel "Bagder" Stenberg -- http://rockbox.haxx.se/

Received on 2002-11-08