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From: Christopher Allan Webber <cwebber@dustycloud.org>
To: "guile-user\@gnu.org" <guile-user@gnu.org>
Subject: ?-suffix for booleans... good-idea? or bad-idea?
Date: Mon, 24 Apr 2017 12:01:06 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <878tmpoi3x.fsf@dustycloud.org> (raw)

Hello everyone!  Here's a little bikeshed for us to paint.

I've noticed that it's common in Guile modules to use "foo?" for
variable names involving booleans.  It's tempting, because this looks
an awful lot like you're asking a question... and it's also common
for this even to be keyword arguments to procedures, etc.

But is it a good idea?  I thought "foo?" was supposed to be for
predicates, as a nicer version of the "foo-p" predicate convention in
other non-scheme lisps.  I can't imagine other lisps doing "foo-p" for
just variables with boolean values.

On the other hand, once you start adding ? to the end of boolean'y
things, it *does* become tempting to put them at the end of boolean
variables and arguments.  It looks pretty nice.

What do people think?  I'm struggling with deciding what's the right
thing for my own code, but leaning towards "we shouldn't use the ?
suffix for just boolean values".

 - Chris



             reply	other threads:[~2017-04-24 17:01 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 13+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2017-04-24 17:01 Christopher Allan Webber [this message]
2017-04-25  3:43 ` ?-suffix for booleans... good-idea? or bad-idea? Alex Vong
2017-04-25 15:50   ` Jan Wedekind
2017-04-25 16:21     ` Paul
2017-04-26 15:25       ` Alex Kost
2017-04-25 18:08   ` Neil Jerram
2017-04-25 16:53 ` Panicz Maciej Godek
2017-04-26  0:23 ` Thompson, David
2017-04-27 10:39 ` Jan Nieuwenhuizen
2017-04-27 10:53   ` Panicz Maciej Godek
2017-04-27 12:07   ` Marko Rauhamaa
2017-05-05 17:26 ` Vladimir Zhbanov
2017-05-05 19:44   ` szgyg

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