How should units in variable names be handled? Often, casing changes the meaning significantly. A va...

# naming

[Landry Norris]

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]

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]

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]

㎃ is a unicode character \u3383 🙂

[ephemient]

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

[ephemient]

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

[Landry Norris]

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]

unless it's performance critical code, I'd take a non-inlined wrapper in TS over the ambiguity any day 🙂

[ephemient]

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]

http://xahlee.info/comp/unicode_units.html if you want to try my initial non-serious answer 😛

[Klitos Kyriacou]

There are a number of third-party libraries for units that might be worth considering:
https://sis.apache.org/apidocs/org/apache/sis/measure/Units.html
https://github.com/vsirotin/si-units
https://nacular.github.io/measured/#/
https://github.com/unitsofmeasurement

[Klitos Kyriacou]

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]

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

👍 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")