New rule proposal: Literal Suffixes should be uppercase

New rule proposal: Literal Suffixes should be uppercase

Category: Readability Rule: Literal suffixes should be uppercase Rationale: Improves readability of code, following recommendation from C# specification

Bad:

long foo = 50l;
decimal bar = 50.4m;

Good:

long foo = 50L;
decimal bar = 50.4M;

See https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa664674(v=vs.71).aspx for the specification for integer literals, in particular the following paragraph:

As a matter of style, it is suggested that “L” be used instead of “l” when writing literals of type long, since it is easy to confuse the letter “l” with the digit “1”.

[sharwell]

I’m currently a “weak no” on this for the following reasons:

1. While it’s clear to me that L is preferable to l, it’s not so clear that this makes any difference for other suffixes. In fact, for the suffix m and the e which appears in floating point values, I almost feel like the lowercase version is more easily distinguished and possibly even more common in existing code.
2. I’ve never seen anyone use the lowercase suffix for integer literals.

@berkeleybross Have you looked for any instances of this syntax in open source projects?

[GregReddick]

I think there should be a consistent rule on the literal suffixes. I really don’t care what it is, I can live with whatever is decided, but there should be one. It can’t violate CS0078. I hate looking through my code and finding that I do something one way in one place and a different way in another place.