How should units in variable names be handled Often casing c

Question

How should units in variable names be handled Often casing changes the meaning significantly A variable currentLimitMA technically implies that the current limit is in mega amps which is very different from the likely intended milli amps I really don t like currentLimitmA since it makes word boundaries unclear

Landry Norris · Answer

I can imagine a variable capacitorPF which if read correctly refers to PetaFerads a very different scale than picoFarads and a value much larger than you d ever see in the real world

Emil Kantis · Answer

how are you getting data into these variables could be a good idea to simply model the units as a value class and accept a Current and Impedance rather than just a number and then that could always be in base units A bit similar to how a Duration can be either a millisecond or a year

ephemient · Answer

is a unicode character ` u3383` slightly smiling face

ephemient · Answer

but for real I d consider a wrapper class that conveys the SI unit

ephemient · Answer

if that s not an option then I d spell it out longhand

Landry Norris · Answer

I d generally prefer wrapper class too and will likely do that for the jvm portion I also have to make a TypeScript library so won t have value classes there

Emil Kantis · Answer

unless it s performance critical code I d take a non inlined wrapper in TS over the ambiguity any day slightly smiling face

ephemient · Answer

or if you make the assumption that nobody would use units of current other than amperes `currentLimitMillis` similar to many time based APIs using `toMillis ` etc assuming that it s simply understood to be multiples of seconds

ephemient · Answer

<http xahlee info comp unicode units html> if you want to try my initial non serious answer stuck out tongue

Klitos Kyriacou · Answer

There are a number of third party libraries for units that might be worth considering

Klitos Kyriacou · Answer

gt <http xahlee info comp unicode units html> if you want to try my initial non serious answer Wow I never knew there were so many symbols and all this time I ve been writing a m and p m instead of and By the way I don t think is related to time I know it as parts per million as used in chemistry

Rob Elliot · Answer

gt but for real I d consider a wrapper class that conveys the SI unit +1 I love `java time Duration` precisely because you stop worrying about the units No more `timeoutMillis` you can just call it `timeout` Staggering number of libraries just call it `timeout` and use a Long as the type of course and have documentation that helpfully explains this represents the time before the operation will fail