Maintaining Method Signatures across languages?

Question

I'm finishing up a port I did of a portion of a Java Library. The library calculates sunrise and sunset for a given latitude and longitude. The original Java library also calculated various times based on sunrise and sunset, which I plan to get to later.

That said, I'm working with Objective-C and the Cocoa touch framework. The original methods, being Java, all began with get and took their arguments in parenthesis. However, Objective-C has a different method structure, so the methods end up looking different. For example,

public double getUTCSunset(AstronomicalCalendar astronomicalCalendar, double zenith, boolean adjustForElevation)

becomes this:

- (double) getUTCSunsetForDate:(NSDate*)date andZenith:(double)zenith adjustForElevation:(BOOL)adjustForElevation.

The problem here is twofold. First of all, according to the Apple Documentation on coding convention, method names (and "getters"), should not include get in them. However, a second issue arises if we drop the get. We end up with a method signature that begins with a capital letter, which is also not supposed to happen.

How would you rewrite this method, while keeping the method signatures similar enough to be recognizable to each other?

Answer 1

- (double) UTCSunsetForDate:(NSDate*)date andZenith:(double)zenith adjustForElevation:(BOOL)adjustForElevation

I think you can start with a capital letter if it's an acronym. Look at NSURLRequest class where some methods begin with URL or HTTP.

Actually, here's a quote from Apple coding guidelines

Start the name with a lowercase letter and capitalize the first letter of
embedded words. Don’t use prefixes. See “Typographic Conventions.” There are two specific exceptions to these guidelines. You may begin a method name with a well-known acronym in uppercase (such as TIFF or PDF)), and you may use prefixes to group and identify private methods (see “Private Methods”).

Answer 2

I haven't really been writing a lot of Objective C these days, but I would expect a method signature like this:

- (double) utcSunsetForDate:(NSDate*)date andZenith:(double)zenith adjustingForElevation:(BOOL)adjustForElevation

'utc' doesn't look as great, but it's definitely better than 'uTC', 'getUTC' or even 'universalCoordinatedTime', which is just way too verbose.

Also, should the return valu really be a double, rather than a UTCTime or something similar?