Mirror of forum.nim-lang.org

1092 :: Naming Variables is too restricitve

• kuba (orginal) [2015-03-30T22:19:30+02:00] view original

  Any chance this will get more relaxed before Nim hits 1.0? I pretty much care only about snake_case and camelCase names. These two trip me over all the time.

---

• Araq (orginal) [2015-03-31T00:10:37+02:00] view original

  Why? Simply don't use snake_case. Works well. ;-)

---

• kuba (orginal) [2015-03-31T07:27:14+02:00] view original

  Well I can see a few:

  • to make the transition to Nim smoother - it takes time to get rid of habits brought from different backgrounds.
  • to make FFI less painful and make 1:1 names for the Nim wrappers
  • to "give a programmer the ultimate power" ;)

---

• novist (orginal) [2015-03-31T08:44:45+02:00] view original

  The only thing that bit me in the ass was trying _var_name. I love that convention from python world and it very well carried all over the place for me, "_" prefix being for private members and having "__" for very private. Anything else.. While i do agree that having 1:1 naming for wrapped libs could make sense, sometimes things are named painfully irrationally. Im fine with naming restriction because it forces one to write more readable code and thus inflict less pain on people reading that code in the future.

---

• coffeepot (orginal) [2015-03-31T10:47:20+02:00] view original

  Just my 2p, but out of all Python's features, underscore prefixes are one of the worst :( To me, it looks ugly and is hard to discern between _ and __ in code at a glance.

  I can see that making variable names tally to other languages is helpful for porting, but personally I am glad to be rid of underscores meaning something. Perhaps this issue is resolved better with translation tooling than with transposing style sensitivity onto variable names in Nim. As novist says, it does lead to more readable code, something I feel Nim strives for and succeeds at.

---

• pyloor (orginal) [2015-03-31T11:36:00+02:00] view original

  I don't see to change the actual nim behaviour. I am fine with it. The python way to mark private or protected vars / functions (which is only a naming convention and does not have any function, it is an emulation) is ugly and i try to avoid it.

---

• novist (orginal) [2015-04-02T10:00:05+02:00] view original

  I can argue that c++'s "m" is much uglier. As well as hungarian notation (which is possible to do in nim). But maybe that is exactly desired property of underscores? They are meant to discourage use of apis named that way. Apparently it works good :)

---