Re: Objective-C Instance Variable Names
Re: Objective-C Instance Variable Names
- Subject: Re: Objective-C Instance Variable Names
- From: Quincey Morris <email@hidden>
- Date: Sat, 5 Apr 2008 18:17:58 -0700
On Apr 5, 2008, at 15:44, Dennis C. De Mars wrote:
There's another solution besides naming conventions. I've been
through most of them -- underscore prefix or postfix, prefix with
"m" etc. I generally don't find naming conventions very
satisfactory. It seems like I'm trying to encode something into the
name that should be evident from the syntax of the language or the
context the variable is used in.
I think the issue with all the solutions suggested so far (myWhatever,
theWhatever, aWhatever, mWhatever, lpWhatever, _whatever, self-
>whatever) is that they're trying to encode primarily *syntactic*
information into the variable name. While there's nothing wrong with
that, some of us (including you, it seems from your comments) find it
somehow ugly or redundant or ... something.
Another approach is to qualify the property name *semantically*
instead. The most common situation where I run into local/instance
variable name conflicts is setter methods. If the property and the
instance variable are both 'whatever', it makes sense to me to call
the setter argument variable 'newWhatever', because that is in fact
what it is. That makes it natural, when you need to move the instance
variable into a local variable, as often happens when releasing and
retaining, to call it 'oldWhatever'.
In other scenarios, other choices suggest themselves. Sometimes it
makes sense to call a local copy of the instance variable
'currentWhatever'. For arguments to initializers, where a value is
passed in that's going straight into an instance variable, the
argument can be called 'initialWhatever'.
Notice that none of those names tell you what the variable is,
syntactically, but they do tell you what it's for, semantically. To
me, that's useful information.
FWIW.
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