[webkit-dev] For your consideration: Naming scheme for fooIfExists/ensureFoo

[Ryosuke Niwa]

On Tue, Jun 18, 2013 at 7:20 PM, Simon Fraser <simon.fraser at apple.com>wrote:

> On Jun 18, 2013, at 7:11 PM, Darin Adler <darin at apple.com> wrote:
>
> On Jun 18, 2013, at 7:05 PM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:
>
> Why don't we call it requireStyleResolver() instead?
>
>
> I’m warming to this idea. Maybe we can use “require” as a term of art,
> analogous to the way we use “create”, to mean “create if not already
> created”.
>
>
> Since the fact that it returns a reference implies that it must create
> something if necessary, the “required” part of the name seems redundant.
> Why not just
> StyleResolver& styleResolver()
>
> requireStyleResolver() sounds like it would return a bool.
>

True. But it's important to differentiate a simple inline accessor and a
lazily-create function because it's very easy to write code like:

if (styleResolver().x())
    styleResolver().y();

and incur two function calls when we could have done

StyleResolver& resolver = styleResolver();
if (resolver.x())
    resolver.y();

instead.

On the other hand, I've started to think that maybe we can simply forbid
the former style altogether in the style guide so that we'll never have to
think about whether a given function is inline or not.

- R. Niwa
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