[llvm-dev] changing variable naming rules in LLVM codebase (original) (raw)

Chris Lattner via llvm-dev llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
Wed Feb 13 01:00:08 PST 2019

On Feb 12, 2019, at 4:02 AM, Björn Pettersson A via llvm-dev <llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:

(Sorry if this subject already has been discussed, but I could not find any clear rules/recommendations.) What would the recommendation be for acronyms (I’ve seen the rule about avoiding them unless they are “well known”, but sometimes an acronym is useful, and we at least need to have some recommendation for the “well known” ones). Example: if (ConstantExpr *CE = dyncast(V)) if (CE->getOpcode() == Instruction::GetElementPtr && CE->getOperand(0)->isNullValue()) { In the above example, is the recommendation to use “ce” instead of “CE” now? Or should it be “cE”? With lowerCamelCase one might think that “cE” is the correct one (although I personally think that one looks quite ugly).

In most examples, you’d use something other than an initialism. I was the one who started the whole CE thing as a contraction of the type into something short, but there are almost always things that work otherwise. For example, I’d now write that example as:

if (ConstantExpr *expr = dyn_cast<ConstantExpr>(value))
  if (expr->getOpcode() == Instruction::GetElementPtr &&
      expr->getOperand(0)->isNullValue()) {

or perhaps ‘constant' instead of ‘expr’.

Maybe there should be an exception that variable names that start with an acronym still should start with an upper case letter?

That would also be fine with me - it could push such a debate down the road, and is definitely important for a transition period anyway.

-Chris

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