5 ms·

Is there a reason for not using 'this'? I assume the risk is that you might have a scope where both this->foo and foo are valid and it's unclear which is which.

• jcelerier 8y ago
  six characters to type vs 1 ?
  • joshvm 8y ago
    You can argue that either way. Seeing 'this' unambiguously implies instance variable. Otherwise you have to spot the underscore and be aware of the conventions in the codebase. A good IDE should highlight class variables vs locals, though. On the other hand code can get really messy with boilerplate like this everywhere, and I personally agree with you. Although I believe Google also promotes human-readable variables over less typing.
    • tokyodude 8y ago
      I actually think implicit "this" is a language wart. I think C++, C#, Java, Swift, etc.. would all be better languages if they required `this`. As it is, nearly every one of them ends up needing a per team naming convention to help make the code readable. int area(int width) { return width * height; } What is "height". Is it a global variable? variable in some outer scope? A member/property of the current object? Absolutely no idea.
• amalcon 8y ago
  Rules like this are usually less about risk, and more about conveying information. If I see a variable ending in "_", I immediately know to look for its definition in the class rather than the local scope.
• nolok 8y ago
  I assume it's because if a dev forgets a this somewhere as a caller/accessor, you now have two problems; whereas if they forget a _, it doesn't compile.
• pjc50 8y ago
  It's unidiomatic? > scope where both this->foo and foo are valid and it's unclear which is which Ideally you'd turn on the compiler option to warn about scope hiding.
  • joshvm 8y ago
    Maybe, though it's a common thing I've seen in setter functions or constructors: Eg void set_foo(int foo) {this->foo = foo;}