What is the deal with enum naming convention?

chung-leong · March 25, 2024, 5:12pm

After downloading the latest master version using ZVM, I ran into this error:

error: no field named 'Auto' in enum 'builtin.Type.ContainerLayout'

The enum in question is apparently no longer capitalized.

My question, having not followed the discussion, is whether it’s been decided once and for all that enums should be in lowercase. If so, is the plan to propagate the change throughout the std namespace prior to the release of 0.12.0?

dimdin · March 25, 2024, 5:59pm

It’s an accepted proposal since 2019-12-31, currently marked for milestone 0.15

github.com/ziglang/zig

style guide: make enum and union fields snake_case the same as struct fields

opened 10:37PM - 24 Mar 19 UTC

andrewrk

breaking standard library proposal accepted docs

Currently we have this problem with `union(enum)`: https://github.com/ziglang…/zig/blob/aff7b38838628a18f384c1f625d71c085c8eee1f/std/zig/ast.zig#L110-L130 Now, if you use `Error.InvalidToken` are you referring to the type, or the enum value? It's ambiguous. This causes switch expressions to resort to awkward uses of `@TagType`: https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/aff7b38838628a18f384c1f625d71c085c8eee1f/std/zig/ast.zig#L133-L141 However if we had a different style guide, the enum value would be `Error.invalid_token` and the type would be `Error.InvalidToken`. This is less of a problem now that #683 is mostly solved, but there is still the ambiguity. This sort of conflicts with #995.

chung-leong · March 25, 2024, 9:29pm

Hmmm, that’s not very reassuring. Is there any sort of plan for the transition? It’d be nice if breaking changes that are stylistic in nature happen only at the beginning of a release cycle.