Comments on: It’s “onBar” or “foo”, not “slotFoo”.

By: Aurélien Gâteau

Aurélien Gâteau — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 11:07:10 +0000

I personally highly dislike when people name their functions like the signal they are connected to. To me a function name should describe an action[1]. ’slotChanged()’ or ‘onChanged()’ look like an action triggered as a result of a ‘changed()’ signal. Naming the function ‘changed()’ is just weird.

Still, the best solution IMO is to name the function after what it does, rather than after what it is connected to, but it’s not always convenient.

[1] Except accessors of course

By: Matt Smith

Matt Smith — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 10:54:18 +0000

The “on” convention definitely does match English usage; “on doing X” means the same as “when X is/was done”. From my experience of learning other languages (German and Arabic), prepositions often don’t stay the same from one language to another.

I don’t use the particular notation you mention (I sometimes put “// slot” at the end of the opening line), but I do use Hungarian notation when naming Qt widgets (but not primitives), simply as a reminder to me when returning to the application after not looking at it for a while; I also find that “pbOk” is more succinct than “OkButton”. The only snag is when two widgets have similar initials (like check-box and combo-box).

By: Diederik

Diederik — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 09:28:16 +0000

I think the “on” prefix is ugly as h*ll. Perhaps it’s because I’m not a native speaker, but it doesn’t give me the sense of an event handler at all.

I tend to use normal function names for public slots (because it’s indeed ugly), and prefix methods with “slot” when they are private event handlers. It’s some indication the method will be called automatically from some point, because you won’t see a function call anywhere.

Sort naming don’t interest me. I’m used to use readable names, even if they are long. Like like acronyms, it works counter productive when you see the code again a few weeks later. (granted “on” is not a acronym, but the argument it’s 2 letters less to type is not really important to me)

By: mattr

mattr — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 03:43:58 +0000

nope, sorry not convinced. the ‘onBar’ naming convention you suggest is used on windows and frankly it’s just as ugly here as it is there. Function names should be descriptive enough that we shouldn’t have to resort to silly prefixes for things whether they’re slots or not (since slots can be called without being triggered by a signal)

By: jml

jml — Fri, 10 Nov 2006 01:53:35 +0000

“connect( object, SIGNAL(bar()), SLOT(onBar()) );” — you got that backwards, I think