Re: Formatting floating point values in ostream objects

From:
James Kanze <james.kanze@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Sun, 20 Jan 2008 01:58:34 -0800 (PST)
Message-ID:
<b0d55549-4d7f-4fa1-827a-9ca5deb04c4b@21g2000hsj.googlegroups.com>
On Jan 19, 7:01 pm, Juha Nieminen <nos...@thanks.invalid> wrote:

Alf P. Steinbach wrote:

Also you're incorrectly indicating that it's a macro, and
you're embedding type information in the name so that (same
problem as with Hungarian evilness) a change of the
constness then requires a change of name, or leaves the name
indicating something that's now false.


  And if you use your suggested scheme, if you ever change a #define
into a const variable, you'll have to change the name.


Certainly. You've significantly changed the semantics, so you
have to look at all uses of it again, to be sure that they are
still OK. Changing the name ensures that you do. (Generally
speaking, of course, if it is a constant, it should never be a
macro to begin with. Macros should be reserved for things that
can't be done otherwise.)

That's also an argument against using all caps for const: one
man's constant is another man's variable, and in practice,
constants do have a tendency of becoming variables, e.g. read
from a configuration file. Long before it became a widely
recognized and generally accepted rule, I'd dropped all caps
from constants because of this---I also don't use all caps for
constants in Java, for the same reason.

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James Kanze (GABI Software) email:james.kanze@gmail.com
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