Slice naming using repeated letters

Technical Discussion
1

I watched a talk given by Brian Ketelsen, where he suggested to use repeated letters to represent a slice.

For instance:

var tt []*Thing

I am not sure whether it is a great idea. In my case, I am writing an http handler
that fetches URL param “message”. So, my code looks like this:

func handlePut(w http.ResponseWriter, r *http.Request) {
	mm, ok := r.URL.Query()["message"]
	if !ok || len(mm) != 1 {
		http.Error(w, "", http.StatusBadRequest)
		return
	}
	m := mm[0]
        ...

I don’t feel like this naming is a right thing to do. I guess that is would be more readable if I used messages and message names instead. Could anyone give me an advice here?

2

I prefer using a -s suffix to indicate that something is a collection.

1 Like
3

Just by taking a look at a random file in golang/go source tree, lookup.go, it seems there are many places they use -s suffix. Usually when I see a tt identifier it is identifying a test table.

1 Like
4

I second what olavfosse said; an s suffix makes more sense to me than doubling the character. I think in Spanish, it’s not uncommon to double characters to signify plural (e.g. I think Estados Unidos (“United States”) becomes “EEUU”).

I also like your idea of just saying messages. It’s idiomatic in Go to use short variable names and I personally follow that guideline, too, but only for small functions that fit in a single “screenful” and where there are few variables in the whole function.

1 Like
5

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