Asklemmy

43898 readers

1434 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

I know that naming variables is one of the biggest unsolved problems of Computer Science but how would you name a boolean flag to be self explanatory? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) by linucs@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

25 comments fedilink hide all child comments

What I mean is: some boolean flags are perfect for the real world phenomenon they are representing e.g. is_light_on makes you understand perfectly that when it is true the light is on and when it is false the light is off.

There are other cases in which if you didn't write the code and you don't read any additional documentation, everything is not clear just by looking at the variable name e.g. is_person_standing, when true it's clear what that means but when false, is the person sitting? Lying? Kneeling?

I'm obviously not talking about cases in which there are more states, boolean would of course not be a good solution in those cases. I'm talking about programs in which there are only two states but it's not obvious, without external knowledge, which ones they are.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] Roberto@mujico.org 7 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Not sure I understand your second example, if is_person_standing is false I'd assume the person is not standing and that's all the information is needed. As you said it yourself, if more information is needed maybe a boolean is not the best choice, or a second variable could be used.

[–] linucs@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Maybe I explained myself poorly, what I was asking is about cases in which there are only two states e.g. standing and sitting and they are equally important so is_person_standing would not be a good name

[–] Roberto@mujico.org 2 points 6 months ago

I think I see what you mean, you have two states and kind of opposite but you usually name the variable after one of them, so you have to "guess" the other one. For instance you could have isRightHand, the opposite state being left hand, but from the variable name you can't be sure if it could be "not right hand" as in right foot or something like that. Man it's kind of difficult to come up with examples.