[Development] Naming convention for (scoped) enums

[Alex Blasche]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Development <development-bounces+alexander.blasche=qt.io at qt-
> project.org> On Behalf Of Simon Hausmann


> > I don't consider the longer names detrimental for writability and usability.
> Writability is easily solved with code completion and readability is actually better
> because the type adds additional context info. To cite an example from Shawn's
> patch:
> >
> > QQuickPointerDevice::Finger
> > QQuickPointerDevice::Mouse
> >
> > is far less descriptive than (and not compliant to current naming convention)
> >
> > QQuickPointerDevice::PointerType::Finger
> > QQuickPointerDevice::DeviceType::Mouse.
> >
> > The uninitiated reader of the code cannot see the additional type context
> when reading code and therefore someone might interpret Finger as a device
> type too. That's exactly what the existing unscoped enum policy tries to fix.
> Scoped enums provide this feature out of the box. Another example of a good
> naming policy (IMO) is QAbstractSocket (never mind the technical limitations).
> Here we could shorten the enum names using scoped enums:
> >
> > QAbstractSocket::SocketError::ConnectionRefusedError ->
> QAbstractSocket::SocketError::ConnectionRefused (or even
> QAbstractSocket::Error::ConnectionRefused)
> >
> > Name clash prevention was only ever secondary to readability.
> >
> We don't need scoped enums to improve readability though, that doesn't
> seem like an argument. To take the finger/mouse example, we would use
> 
>      QQuickPointerDevice::FingerPointer
> 
> or
> 
>      QQuickPointerDevice::PointerType_Finger
> 
> and you get exactly the same benefit, no?

I don't see how your two options above are any different(better?) readability wise than QQuickPointerDevice::PointerType::Finger.

I believe I mentioned earlier that in light of Qt 6 it might actually make sense to rename some enum type names too which means
QQuickPointerDevice::Pointer::Finger is possible and we can remove some of the redundancy between enum type name and enum value name.

Sure, we can get away with the old style of naming but when you consider that the length of the string is extremely close to being the same and gain type safety, why would we not use them? Of course, if you purposely don't want to type safety traditional enums are still the way to go.

My five cents..
--
Alex