From: Craig Demyanovich <cdemyanovich@...>
Date: 2007-02-22T15:17:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Trade-off between variable name descriptiveness and readability

On Feb 22, 2007, at 12:32 AM, Daniel Finnie wrote:

> As a mentor of the new adopt-a-newbie system, which I think is  
> going excellently, I was reviewing a 99-bottles-of-beer method.  We  
> went over what he had, what I thought could be better and I showed  
> an example of exactly how I would do it, which was this:
>
> > def sing_song(start)
> > 	start.downto(1) do |numBottles|
> > 		puts "#{numBottles.bottles} of beer on the wall, # 
> {numBottles.bottles} of beer!"
> > 		puts "Take one down, pass it around, #{(numBottles-1).bottles}  
> of beer on the wall"
> > 		puts
> > 	end
> > end
>
> String#bottles just does "x bottle(s if needed)."  Anyway, one  
> could further refine this code to be more english-y by changing  
> numBottles to num in the following way:
>
> > def sing_song(start)
> > 	start.downto(1) do |num|
> > 		puts "#{num.bottles} of beer on the wall, #{num.bottles} of beer!"
> > 		puts "Take one down, pass it around, #{(num-1).bottles} of beer  
> on the wall"
> > 		puts
> > 	end
> > end
>
> I doing this, the code reads better but the variable's name loses a  
> lot of its descriptiveness.  What would all of you guys do?  I was  
> also thinking of renaming the bottles method to disp, but that has  
> the potential to conflict with a lot of other things and doesn't  
> really describe what the method does.  I also considered putting  
> numBottles.bottles into a variable but it didn't seem right.

The second method above reads a little better to me than the first;  
numBottles.bottles is repetitive. However, I don't like "start," and  
I'd like to throw out "how_many" in place of "num":

def sing_song(bottles_on_the_wall)
   bottles_on_the_wall.downto(1).do | how_many |
     puts "#{how_many.bottles} of beer on the wall, # 
{how_many.bottles} of beer!"
     puts "Take one down, pass it around, #{(how_many - 1).bottles}  
of beer on the wall"
     puts
   end
end

What do you think?

Craig