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A quick tip for better variable names (programming.dev)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by sisyphean@programming.dev to c/programming@programming.dev

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Whenever you store a value that has a unit in a variable, config option or CLI switch, include the unit in the name. So:

maxRequestSize => maxRequestSizeBytes
elapsedTime => elapsedSeconds
cacheSize => cacheSizeMB
chargingTime => chargingTimeHours
fileSizeLimit => fileSizeLimitGB
temperatureThreshold => temperatureThresholdCelsius
diskSpace => diskSpaceTerabytes
flightAltitude => flightAltitudeFeet
monitorRefreshRate => monitorRefreshRateHz
serverResponseTimeout => serverResponseTimeoutMs
connectionSpeed => connectionSpeedMbps

EDIT: I know it’s better to use types to represent units. Please don’t write yet another comment about it. You can find my response to that point here: https://programming.dev/comment/219329

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[–] cgtjsiwy@programming.dev 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

In languages with static and convenient type systems, I try to instead encode units as types. With clever C++ templating, you can even get implicit conversions (e.g. second -> hour) and compound types (e.g. meter and second types also generate m/s, m/s^2 and so on).

[–] sisyphean@programming.dev 3 points 1 year ago

IIRC F# even has built-in support for units.

[–] CoderKat@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

A good example is Go's time package. You'd normally express durations like 5 * time.Second and the result is a time.Duration. Under the hood, it's just an int64 nanoseconds, but you'd never use it as a plain nanoseconds. You'd instead use it like d.Seconds() to get whichever unit you desire.