In Ruby and some other languages, type is a reserved keyword. I often find myself a bit tripped up by this because I often want to assign “types” in one way or the other. type_of or perhaps category are others.
I want to expand my vocabulary. Thanks.
Makes you want to program in PL/I, doesn't it? In PL/I the "keywordiness" is determined by the position of the word. That leads to fun things like
Most of the time if I'm doing document/table design for a data structure, I'll end up using something like
itemType, but after looking at this post and thinking on it a bit, some other seemingly good options would seem to be:purposelabeland perhaps,
mold.purposeI like in that it conveys the meaning of the thing, eg. "this thing is meant to be an array", where as label is a bit shorter to type, but could be confused for another more useful property on a data item.moldis nice because it is shorter to type, but a bit more ambiguous in terms of what it could be referencing./my2cents
Personally want to see
flavorin our database, but that's just me 🙃kind has a very specific meaning too - while not a reserved keyword anywhere as far as I know, it could potentially be confusing when used to mean something else. I lean towards
groupor_grpas a suffix.Haha, this reminds me of an educational app that I once written in which the teacher was meant to organize "classes". I was torn between Java-ish "clazz" spelling and less domain-ish "lesson" (I went for the "lesson").
Anyway, for issues like that Thesaurus is my best friend. I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all synonym for
type, because different synonyms fit best in different contexts.Personally, I always look for a synonym rather than prefixing like
post_typeorwidget_type, because I hate the way it reads in the code later e.g.widget.widget_type, grr!I don't think there's any other word that can be used as an alternative to
typewhich also gives the correct impression to the person reading it that you are exactly referring to a type of something...typeis the best term I know. I go even further and name integer fields with a reference to another table (forgeign keys) like*_type_id.For example.
addresses.address_type_idorcustomers.customer_privacy_type_id.Not an answer, but where are you seeing
typeas being reserved in Ruby? It's discouraged in Rails as it's used by default for STI, but if you want to go against the grain you can even override that.Like others I tend to agree that more context is needed to come up with the right word. To me
typejust means "type of class." If we're talking about something else then other words are useful, but generically.. oof.. tough to say.typThat one works great in Swedish.
TIL!
"kind" seems like a nice alternative but I must say that I end up either using a prefix like "orderType" or finding a way to not specify a type at all.
That might be an interesting second question: if you have to give something a type, what are differentiators? For instance a product might have a type: "paid" | "free" but you could also look at whether there is a price on it.
And in the other direction: when you add a type that implies a lot of difference, maybe you need separate entities.
Depends so much on context. Names are tough. Is it helpful to think about what the type is distinguishing between? Sometimes, for me,the 'why do I have this field?' suggests an answer (user_type -> access_level)
There's ilk. I would generally start with a data model of the domain and 'group' often suggests itself as an entity name, and therefore as a foreign key (as in productGroup, userGroup etc), or community, department, set...
If the field/data item is there just for the purpose of logic or program design and does not refer to a defined entity or object, I would look again at why it is there.
I will sometimes use
kindin these situations but usually end up prefixingtypewith something more semantic:user_type,post_type, etc.In Elm a common practice, even in the core libraries, is to use
type_. For example package.elm-lang.org/packages/elm/...thesaurus.com/browse/type ;)
breedlotis the best alternative I've seen so far :DI usually suffix
_typedepending on what I'm categorising (e.g.widget_type). "Sort" also is nice and short, but has the downside of being a form of the verb sorting.True. I normally would think sort as order of something.
Cool! I’ve used kind and group at times. Kind strikes me as a pretty solid synonym for type, and group is a great word for type-like things.
Still in search of the perfect synonym 😂
I like group, which can easily be inferred from shorthand
grpto save typing...Used in French to mean "kind of" / class / type.
My favorite alternative to "type" is "kind".
genus/species/phylum :)