Question: don't use leading k in Go names. Why?

[DavidGamba]

I can't find any reference indicating why Golint warns when doing this. Some explanation would be greatly appreciated!

[dominikh]

Idiomatic Go doesn't use Hungarian notation and variable names shouldn't be prefixed with their intended use. For example, a constant should be named foo or Foo, not kFoo or KFoo.

[DavidGamba]

Thank you for the answer. I have a KBToMB function and it drives me crazy to see the lint error not knowing why.

[dominikh]

@DavidGamba Are you using a recent version of golint? Looking at the code, it only matches on lowercase k, not uppercase K. It also doesn't match if the letter following the k isn't uppercase. So neither KBToMB nor kbToMB should get flagged.

[DavidGamba]

@dominikh, I apologize, the actual name I have is kBToMB because it is unexported. I should be using kbToMB to avoid mixing case in initialisms.

[agnivade]

Hi,

I am bit by this rule. I have a kafka consumer and a partition consumer in my struct. I am naming them as kConsumer and pConsumer. But the kConsumer is throwing lint error. I would really want to avoid naming it consumer just to make it clear that its a kafka consumer.

What is the recommendation here ? Do I have to name it kafkaConsumer ?

[joelpresence]

I am also having issues with this where I am parsing an array of strings of the form []string{"key1", "value1","key2","value2"} for example:

var arr = []string{"key1", "value1","key2","value2"}
for i, kOrV := range arr {
}

I am clearly NOT using Hungarian notation here - the kOrV means keyOrValue so why am I being falsely penalized by golint here?

This is clearly a bug in golint in this case, or at best an annoying false positive. Is there any way we can fix this?

Thanks!

[nilsanderselde]

I'm writing a web server for a site which serves information about a phonetic orthography I've made for English for fun. In one template processing file I have these vars:

	ɑIPA  = "IPA: ɑ/ɔ/ɒ"
	æIPA  = "IPA: æ"
	ɛIPA  = "IPA: ɛ/e"
...
	kIPA  = "IPA: k"
...
	dʒIPA = "IPA: d͡ʒ"
	tʃIPA = "IPA: t͡ʃ"

(Most of the phonemes in the above code were omitted here to conserve space.)

I am told, 'don't use leading k in Go names; var kIPA should be iPA'.

If you look at the pattern here, I am clearly not using Hungarian notation.

I think this shouldn't be marked as a problem.

[vikyd]

How about using k short for key? Such as looping a map:

for k, v := range params {
	kTrim := strings.TrimSpace(k)
	vTrim := strings.TrimSpace(v)
	delete(params, k)
	params[kTrim] = vTrim
}

[campoy]

Just adding one more corner case in which this rule bit us, we wrote a function that implements a k shortest path routing algorithm and obviously we called it kShortestPath.

Unfortunately that's also mistakenly identified as Hungarian notation.