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Caro is thinking out loud

Put units in variable names

When defining a variable that represents some sort of quantity - time, money, distance etc - make sure your variable makes it clear what the unit - seconds, Euros, metres - of that quantity is. You can do this in the name - timeout_seconds rather than just timeout, or by using a more specific type if your language supports that, for example a timedelta rather than an integer.

This also applies to names of things in your APIs, configuration files, function arguments, command-line flags, basically anywhere where ambiguity could arise and cause problems.

Further Reading

  • Pint is a Python library to help with dealing with numbers that have units, and their docs are pretty great about why you might want such a thing.

Sources