On Mar 22, 2011, at 7:15 AM, Max Sobolev wrote:
On 21.03.2011 16:10, Robert Jones wrote:
On Mar 21, 2011, at 4:52 AM, Max Sobolev wrote:
I /hate/ lhs/rhs identifiers :( (despite my respect to people that use it (Scott Meyers etc.) :))
How curious... despite all their demonstrable short comings (similarity, redundancy, etc), I think that pair of identifiers are some of the best, most instantly recognisable and understandable identifiers ever coined! Each to their own I guess.
it's fine for asm, ........but in C++ we probably should write:
I don't see why asm needs shorter identifiers. On the contrary, assembly instructions tend to be very brief, in contrast to C++ statements whose readability sometimes improves with shorter identifier names.
Type operator + (Type const& left_hand_side, Type const& right_hand_side) { . . . }
No, this is worse than 'lhs' and 'rhs'. The two abbreviations are easily recognized for what they are (even if distinguishing one from the other takes some thought) but the spelled-out terms one must read and interpret, only to realize they mean nothing (other than to state what position they appear in). For the same reason, I always write loop indices as 'i', not 'index', and especially not 'widget_index' -- any information provided only serves to distract.
(So far I don't confide that "left hand side" is a right decryption for /lhs/)
I'm quite certain that's the phrase which 'lhs' abbreviates. I suppose children have an easier time learning left from right if they use their body parts as cognitive training wheels instead of dealing directly with abstract concepts. Adults don't need such devices, but 'ls' and 'rs' would be worse identifiers (with the 's' still being redundant). I think of 'r' as meaning 'radius', and 'l' is just asking for trouble because it's so similar to '1'.
Type operator + (Type const& left, Type const& right) { . . . }
I associate left and right with graphics systems.
left/right are too simple :( but not horrible names. Articulation of /lhs/ and /rhs/ is much longer then /left/ and /right/ words, because former consists of 3 syllables (l - h - s), and later consists of 1 only.
I use 'a' and 'b'. They're each one character and one syllable, and it's obvious without thinking which order they go in. And they don't look like they might mean something more than they actually do. inline bool operator<=( const Foo& a, const Foo& b ) { return !(b < a); } This is similar to Perl's use of $a and $b as the parameters to sort callbacks.
i use left/right argument names for binary operators as free functions, and /other/ for unary member functions (+ cctor) with an argument of class type (This later is a boost convention).
I use 'other' in the same way. Josh