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Comment by vmaurin | Hacker News Reader

For me it is not concept to oppose. You can write optimized code but still name your variables "first_item" instead of u_fp_64_ptr like I often see in "optimized code"

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When code needs to be heavily optimized, the fact that some variable is a pointer to a 64bit unsigned floating point number may well be more relevant for understanding the code than the fact that it points to the first item in some list.

But that is explicitly known by the type, we are not writing 90s era microsoft office (hungarian notation really should not be used).

The name of a variable is supposed to contain the most relevant information someone needs when looking at an expression. If the most relevant information is the type, then that should be name. The fact that the compiler knows the type doesn't help me understand the code if I have to scroll two screens up to see what it was.

Imagine you see some code masking the first 40 bits from the location pointed to by first_item. Does the name "first_item" help you understand why they are doing that, or would it be more useful to know that it is the first forty bits of an u_fp_64, so it's masking the mantissa and just keeping the exponent?

> The fact that the compiler knows the type doesn't help me understand the code if I have to scroll two screens up to see what it was.

Doesn't your IDE allow you to effortlessly see the type of a variable, either through inline hints, some sort of keyboard shortcut or at the very least, by hovering your mouse over it?

Admittedly I haven't professionally worked in C/C++ since university, but my understanding is that small functions can be (are?) inlined, removing the function call overhead. If that's the case, couldn't you write a 1-line function like "maskMantissa", which would clearly communicate what the code is doing without overhead?

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