On Wed, Jun 19, 2024 at 2:21 PM Melanie Plageman
<melanieplageman@gmail.com> wrote:
> If we want to make it possible to use no tools and only manually grep
> for struct members, that means we can never reuse struct member names.
> Across a project of our size, that seems like a very serious
> restriction. Adding prefixes in struct members makes it harder to read
> code -- both because it makes the names longer and because people are
> more prone to abbreviate the meaningful parts of the struct member
> name to make the whole name shorter.
I don't think we should go so far as to never reuse a structure member
name. But I also do use 'git grep' a lot to find stuff, and I don't
appreciate it when somebody names a key piece of machinery 'x' or 'n'
or something, especially when references to that thing could
reasonably occur almost anywhere in the source code. So if somebody is
creating a struct whose names are fairly generic and reasonably short,
I like the idea of using a prefix for those names. If the structure
members are things like that_thing_i_stored_behind_the_fridge (which
is long) or cytokine (which is non-generic) then they're greppable
anyway and it doesn't really matter. But surely changing something
like rs_flags to just flags is just making everyone's life harder:
[robert.haas pgsql]$ git grep rs_flags | wc -l
38
[robert.haas pgsql]$ git grep flags | wc -l
6348
--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
