Programming

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

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.

I prefer to encode quantities as types (and store value with most precision inside) and provide functions that return it in desired unit as int/long/whatever.

E.g. Duration type that stores nanoseconds and has to_seconds(), to_milliseconds() etc. It just feels more natural to me. Why should some function care which units are used? It just needs "duration" and will convert to desired unit internally (also it won't be part of its api which is good because it's unnecessary restriction).

Of course some C++ devs will disdain this approach because it's inefficient to pass highest precision value around when its not needed but for my use cases it doesn't matter.

Also, you should always use standard types when available. E.g. C++ has std::chrono, in Java world there are java.time types and kotlin.Duration.

I like how in Nim you can create a type and then overload default operators to support custom types (operators are just functions with 2 arguments in Nim), in example: you can do Hours + Seconds or kilometers * miles, etc. It feels very organic and not like a "hack".

I absolutely agree. But:

• sometimes you need to modify existing code and you can't add the types necessary without a giant refactoring
• you can't express units with types in:
  • JSON/YAML object keys
  • XML tag or attribute names
  • environment variable names
  • CLI switch names
  • database column names
  • HTTP query parameters
  • programming languages without a strong type system

Obviously as a Hungarian I have a soft spot for Hungarian notation :) But in these cases I think it's warranted.

There are plenty of times where the type is just something generic like an integer and making a wrapper type is not worth the effort and this is a useful approach.

I understand what you mean, and I even agree with it, but just to be a little pedantic, variable names are code, or at least they are more code than comments or docs.

But yes, encoding units into the type system is a much better solution. It doesn't work however for config options, environment variables or CLI switches.

That constant frustration is what made me write this post :)

Related: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong

TL;DR: there is good and bad Hungarian notation. Encoding types (like string or int) in variable names is bad. Encoding information that cannot be expressed in the type system is good. (Though with the development of type systems, more and more of those concepts can be moved into the types, keeping variable names clean.)

But as a Hungarian, I'm obviously a little biased :)

In that case I would call the variable fileSizeWithUnit and also document what the possible units are. I wouldn't say that documentation is categorically more important than good naming. Both are different aspects of good software development.

Then use bytes