Trailing underscores for member variables in C++

Solution 1:

In C++,

1. identifiers starting with an underscore, followed by a capital character
2. identifiers having two consecutive underscores anywhere
3. identifiers in the global namespace starting with an underscore

are reserved to the implementation. (More about this can be found here.) Rather than trying to remember these rules, many simply do not use identifiers starting with an underscore. That's why the trailing underscore was invented.

However, C++ itself is old, and builds on 40 years of C (both of which never had a single company behind them), and has a standard library that has "grown" over several decades, rather than brought into being in a single act of creation. This makes for the existence of a lot of differing naming conventions. Trailing underscore for privates (or only for private data) is but one, many use other ones (not few among them arguing that, if you need underscores to tell private members from local variables, your code isn't clear enough).

As for getters/setters - they are an abomination, and a sure sign of "quasi classes", which I hate.

Solution 2:

I've read The C++ Programming Language and Stroustrup doesn't use any kind of convention for naming members. He never needs to; there is not a single simple accessor/mutator, he has a way of creating very fine object-oriented designs so there's no need to have a method of the same name. He uses structs with public members whenever he needs simple data structures. His methods always seem to be operations. I've also read somewhere that he disencourages the use of names that differ only by one character.

Solution 3:

I am personally a big fan of this guideline: http://geosoft.no/development/cppstyle.html

It includes omitting the m_ prefix, using an underscore suffix to indicate private member variables and dropping the horrid, annoying-to-type habit of using underscores instead of space, and other, more detailed and specific suggestions, such as naming bools appropriately(isDone instead of just done) and using getVariable() instead of just variable() to name a few.