Re: question about linker

On 03.12.2024 16:00, David Brown wrote:

 
A general guideline followed by most people is to have the length of
identifiers (or their semantic content) increase with larger scope of
the identifier.  "i" is fine as a counter of a small loop, but you would
not want to use it for a file-scope static.

We've basically had just two types; semantical entities with
explicit names, and local technical entities. But we anyway
hadn't handled that too strictly; feedback from code-reviews
corrected the worst excesses, or suggested name alternatives.

[...]
 
But I dislike it when people use things like "indx" for "index" or "cnt"
for "count".

(I also dislike saving single characters "indx" or "creat()".)

Actually in local contexts (small scope) I have no issues with
writing 'c' instead of 'count', or 'msg' instead of 'message'.

The terser formulation (in a local structure) I think usually
increases readability.

Typically 'count' appears not being better than 'c' since both
are technical entities and don't carry semantical information,
in contexts like 'count++' or 'c++' you see it's counting even
when writing 'x++' or 'foobar++'.

Where the semantics of such an entity is relevant its name was
even larger, like, say, 'inhabitants_count'. Or you may even
strip the technical count 'inhabitants++', or 'nof_inhabitants'
(we used the common "number of ..." abbreviated as "nof_...").

Janis