Question

There is a more generic question asked here. Consider this as an extension to that.

I understand that classes represent type of objects and we should use nouns as their names. But there are function objects supported in many language that acts more like functions than objects. Should I name those classes also as nouns, or verbs are ok in that case. doSomething(), semantically, makes more sense than Something().

Update / Conclusion

The two top voted answers I got on this shares a mixed opinion:

Attila

In the case of functors, however, they represent "action", so naming them with a verb (or some sort of noun-verb combination) is more appropriate — just like you would name a function based on what it is doing.

Rook

The instance of a functor on the other hand is effectively a function, and would perhaps be better named accordingly. Following Jim’s suggestion above, SomethingDoer doSomething; doSomething();

Both of them, after going through some code, seems to be the common practice. In GNU implementation of stl I found classes like negate, plus, minus (bits/stl_function.h) etc. And variate_generator, mersenne_twister (tr1/random.h). Similarly in boost I found classes like base_visitor, predecessor_recorder (graph/visitors.hpp) as well as inverse, inplace_erase (icl/functors.hpp)

Answer 1

Objects (and thus classes) usually represent “things”, therefore you want to name them with nouns. In the case of functors, however, they represent “action”, so naming them with a verb (or some sort of noun-verb combination) is more appropriate — just like you would name a function based on what it is doing.

In general, you would want to name things (objects, functions, etc.) after their purpose, that is, what they represent in the program/the world.

You can think of functors as functions (thus “action”) with state. Since the clean way of achieving this (having a state associated with your “action”) is to create an object that stores the state, you get an object, which is really an “action” (a fancy function).

Note that the above applies to languages where you can make a pure functor, that is, an object where the invocation is the same as for a regular function (e.g. C++). In languages where this is not supported (that is, you have to have a method other than operator() called, like command.do()), you would want to name the command-like class/object a noun and name the method called a verb.