Re: [PATCH 11/11] strvec: rename struct fields

From: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
Date: Jul 28, 2020, 21:16 UTC
Message-ID: <xmqqr1svcpcn.fsf@gitster.c.googlers.com>
In-Reply-To: <20200728202823.GK1021513@coredump.intra.peff.net>

Jeff King <peff@peff.net> writes:

Show 17 quoted lines

> The "argc" and "argv" names made sense when the struct was argv_array,
> but now they're just confusing. Let's rename them to our usual "nr" and
> "items" (which we use for string_list, as well as many ALLOC_GROW()
> arrays).
>
> Note that we have to update all of the callers immediately. Playing
> tricks with the preprocessor is hard here, because we wouldn't want to
> rewrite unrelated tokens.
>
> Signed-off-by: Jeff King <peff@peff.net>
> ---
> I'm actually not that fond of "items". I almost went with just:
>
>   const char **v;
>
> as the variable name which contains it usually provides sufficient
> context. But I worried that people would consider that too inscrutable.

I'd agree that v[] is a good name. If it is too short, I can live with item[], but not with items[]. Clearly we are mostly accessing one element at a time much more often than treating the set as a whole, so signaling "there are multiple things in the set" with a plural name is much less important than being able to say item[4] to name the 4th item in the collection.