Monday, June 23, 2003

"this" Considered Harmful

This is a favourite of mine, one that I would consider others adopting: "Don't Repeat Yourself. If you really insist upon adorning your object fields with some token, I will argue that "this." is a horrible way of doing so. Instead, consider prefixing your field with a consistent name or character...Adopting a prefix like "m_" or "_" is preferable to "this" because the compiler ensures consistency. It does not rely on human programmers to remember to repeat the "this" prefix over and over."

I would prefer using something a little more expressive to prefix my variables names instead of "m_" or "_". I prefer to name the variables being passed in with prefixes such as "new", "old", "existing", etc., whatever makes sense.

This is similar to my beef on checked vs unchecked exceptions.

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