[Cobalt-developers] Unintentional hiding of member variables in Java

[Harri <har...@tu...>]

I have spotted some bugs or potential-to-be-bugs in BOSS
because of introducing local variables with the exact
same name as a member variable.

In some occasion the member variables were not at all used,
and instead local variables of the same name were used.
If some code were later added to the class that used
the member variables, it wouldn't work because they were
not updated by the original code.

In some cases no problems had yet to be experienced, but
future changes to the code would make the code easy to
break down.

In all of the cases it made the code hard to read and
understand.

I have tried to fix some of the occurances in our
development version at our university, but the problem
will not go away completely unless some consistent
variable name convention will be used in BOSS development.
It is the only straight forward way to deal with this
issue.

In all, I think it would make BOSS code much easier to
read if member variables had a naming convention that
would make them clearly visible in code. That way the
reader could easily see where the object itself is
being modified and where the member variables are
being referenced. [1] [2]

Currently both variable names and member variable names
are of form firstWordInLowerCase.

I would suggest one of the following naming convention
for member variable names:

slaveServerName_
m_slaveServerName
_slaveServerName

Yours,
Harri J=E4rvi

References:
[1] http://www.lrdev.com/lr/java/cdccglj.html
[2] http://www.beust.com/naming/