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4 Votes

Remove Identifier Limit on Traditional Synergy code and xfserverplus methods - DBL-W-BIGIDEN


I don't understand why at this point in time we are still have variables being truncated in our development process.  I think this should be changed to match the synergy.net limit, which is significantly larger. 

We have new developers who are running into this issue a lot as they are used to creating long descriptive variable names - for instance:  carrier_appointments_delete_many as a xfserverplus method gives the error, as does a property named NUMBER_OF_ERRORS_REPORTED_CHGDSP.  

Also, if this is going to be a warning, why would you let us name fields like this in the repository in the first place?  There should be a limit on there that will at least warn you if you are creating something that will cause problems down the line.  

This should be on your list of things to remove this limitation so we can have more descriptive names in our synergy code.  

Thanks, 
Greg

2 Comments | Posted by Greg Creme to Synergy DBL, Synergy DBMS, xfServerPlus, Repository on 11/11/2021 2:24 PM
David Demers
"Names Matter" Bob Martin(Uncle Bob), Clean Code

11/12/2021 1:36 PM   0  
Steve Ives
While we do understand the desire here and would like to be able to offer an immediate "yes", unfortunately, it's not that simple. The current limit on identifier length is ingrained throughout the compiler, runtime, repository, and many other tools, and would require a very significant amount of time and effort to change. And even if we were able to make the change, there may still be areas of the product that could not support longer identifier lengths.

There is one possibility that we may be able to consider, which is the use of some type of name-mangling technique similar to what already happens with names in OO namespaces and classes, but there are currently too many unknowns to commit to being able to implement that. What we will commit to is to do more research on the subject, and if anything changes we will comment again on this thread.

12/6/2021 4:31 PM   0  
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