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

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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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[–] fubo 1 points 1 year ago

Typing, yay.

But command-line flags are written as strings. And that's one place this problem crops up: in the stringly-typed interface between your program and its operators, courtesy of argv and your favorite flags library.

Consider:

crapserver --cache-size=1024

Did I just give my crapserver a cache of 1024 B, or kiB, or MiB? Or maybe I told it to reserve space for 1024 cache entries? (How big is a cache entry?)

It's pretty easy to just call the flag --cache-size-bytes or --cache-max-entries so the operator can easily see what's going on.