naming convention for scalars, lists, dictionaries ...

[Jack Diederich]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2005 at 11:32:22AM -0700, Steven Bethard wrote:
> beliavsky at aol.com wrote:
> >Since Python does not have declarations, I wonder if people think it is
> >good to name function arguments according to the type of data structure
> >expected, with names like "xlist" or "xdict".
> 
> In general, I find that naming collections for their contents is much 
> more useful than some abbreviated type prefix.  However, while I don't 
> name objects by their type, I do tend to name iterables with plurals 
> (e.g. "words", "feature_indices", "events", etc.) and I typically suffix 
> mapping types with "map" (e.g. "word_index_map", "event_relation_map", 
> "prime_factor_map", etc.)
> 
Ditto for me, plural implies list and singular implies instance, 
for (contact) in contacts:
   # do something with contact

But I tend to name dictionaries as "key_to_value" as in 
"email_to_contact" or "ip_to_hostname."  

for (email) in emails:
  contact = email_to_contact[email]
  # do something with contact

It may seem verbose but I can type much faster than I can think and 
it makes reading even forgotten code a breeze.

-Jack