The PBP suggests that boolean variables and subroutines should get special naming consideration, and be named in ways that read well. That may involve giving them names like “is_whatever” or “has_whaterver” or “can_whatever”, so that they make contextual sense.
This is a good idea. I’ve done this for a long time, way back from the days of C++. When the rest of the Microsoft world was still using Hungarian Notation to identify what pointer widths things were, I wound up working at a place with different naming rules. Those rules included things like this, and it worked great.
(Calling member varibles “myThing” instead of “m_lpszThing” was great, too. Calling globals “theGlobal” made sense. It was cool, and never caught on.)
This is a good, easy thing to do and helps a lot.
One of the examples is sub metadata_available_for, which I might have called is_metadata_available. I’d also have made it a method, not a function, though. Pretty minor nit.
Tags: perl programming