[Python-ideas] keywording prohibited

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Sun, 3 May 2009 12:28:47 pm Adam Atlas wrote:

> Isn't the convention to suffix a name with an underscore when it
> would clash with a builtin? (range_, list_, type_, etc.)

That's one convention. Another is to name things alist, atype, astr,. 
etc. If you need two of them, the obvious extension is blist, btype...

When writing *small* generic methods or functions, I'm also fond of 
using L for list, x and y for floats, n or i for ints, and similar. 
This needs to be handled with care, for obvious reasons.


> I'm not sure how much I like that stylistically, but I've seen it
> used a lot. (I think in some cases there are better alternatives --
> e.g. instead of naming a variable "seq" or "list_", I'd have the name
> specify what it's a list *of*.)

Well, this is Python, and we use duck-typing, so everything would need 
to be list_of_string_like_instances or similar :)

But seriously, I tend to use plurals for that. If I have an argument 
that takes a collection of widgets, say, I call it "widgets", and write 
code like this:

for widget in widgets:
    whatever()

I don't think there's much to be gained by calling it "list_of_widgets" 
unless it really needs to be a list, and not any other collection type.



-- 
Steven D'Aprano