Re: [chiPHPug-discuss] object variable naming

[Arlo L. <ar...@ar...>]

> It'd be really confusing code with those similar names.

> Yes, it is kind of crazy: you're deliberately obfuscating your own code.
> Using the same name two different ways is shooting yourself in the
> foot.  I'm a lousy typist myself, but it would never occur to me to
> try something like this.

All right, thanks for the sanity check. I could to something like
$objProfile or $obj_profile, but I've always stayed away from that Hungarian
notation kind of approach.

The most common situation I've run into is that one variable name describes
both an object and a member in a related class. For example, I have
subscribers and some subscribers have profiles. Here's a super-simplified
example:

$subscriber = new Subscriber();
$profile = $subscriber->getValue("profile");
$profile = new Profile($profile); // oops, now $profile is ambiguous

Since the profile member in the Subscriber class is a pointer to a separate
Profile record, I guess most people would call that $profile_id. That's
almost like Hungarian notation to me and I've never had the need to do that
before. But now that I'm using objects a lot, my namespace has to
accommodate one more type of data than before, so something has to give.

By the way, I could just access $subscriber->profile rather than creating a
local variable for $profile, but I like making the class members protected
so I'm not tempted to set them directly and bypass any internal
functionality in the class. If I could make the members read-only, that
would work -- but PHP doesn't offer that, right?

Cheers,
-Arlo

_______________________________

Arlo Leach
773.769.6106
http://arlomedia.com