Convention for Filenames of Generic Classes [closed]
Solution 1:
At Microsoft, they use ClassNameOfT.cs.
Solution 2:
Just found this question after looking for what conventions other people use for generic class filenames.
Lately I've been using ClassName[T].cs. I really like this convention, and I think it's superior to the others for the following reasons:
- The type parameters jump out at you a
little more than they do with the
Microsoft convention (e.g.,
ClassNameOfT.cs). - It allows you to have multiple
type parameters without too much
confusion:
Dictionary[TKey, TValue].cs - It doesn't require you to create any special folders, or to have your generic classes in a special namespace. If you only have a few generic classes, having a special namespace dedicated to them just isn't practical.
I borrowed this convention from Boo's generic syntax, albeit slightly modified (Boo uses ClassName[of T]).
Some developers seem to have a phobia of filenames that contain anything but letters and underscores, but once you can get past that this convention seems to work extremely well.
Solution 3:
I see that this topic has been abandoned more than a year ago, but still I would like to share my view on this convention.
First of all, having multiple classes that have the same name but only differ in the amount of type-parameters isn't always a case of backwards compatibility. Surely, you don't see it very often, but the new Action- and Func-classes of .NET were just designed this way, and I'm currently implementing something similar.
For clarity and distinguishability, I use the following convention that only specifies the number of generic arguments for a given type:
- MyClass.cs
- MyClass.T1.cs
- MyClass.T2.cs
This way, my filenames stay short and simple while still clearly communicating the class-name and the different amount of type parameters at the cost of a simple extra dot (which is, in my experience, a commonly accepted thing to do in a filename and looks much better than comma's and other non-alpanumeric characters, but this is just a matter of taste I guess). Putting the names (or acronyms) of the type parameters just lengthens the filenames while at this level I'm not really interested in the actual names of the type parameters anyway...