Re: Hungarian Notation


I doubt very much it would take your wife more than a few trivial *seconds* to adapt to such prefixes.

No, that's not right. It will take seconds to adjust to the idea of prefixes. It will take a long time to learn all the abbreviations. They aren't standard.

If they were things everyone learned while learning Delphi, and there was just one set that everbody used, then it wouldn't be as much of a problem (it still wouldn't be easy - see below). Not many people have trouble with using "T" for type names, for example. (When people start using "C" or "R" is gets a bit confusing though.)

But that is not the case with component names. I can guess that "btn" means "button". But what about "cb", is it a ComboBox or a CheckBox? If I haven't come across "chk" before, how would I know? There are other things with identical obvious abbreviations, like DataSource and DataSet. And it gets much worse.

I tried counting the number of components in my D2005, but got bored at 300, and I wasn't even nearly at the end of the list. Do you really think that learning that many abbreviations is easy? Maybe for you it is, but for *most* of us, that's hard.

And that's even before you've installed any third-party components you might be using.

I also don't like prefix notation, as it is not the natural way to name most things In English, but that's a language bias, and won't necessarily hold for non-English names. But I don't think you would much care for it either if you weren't using abbreviations.

but I do not share that preference.

Well, (a) I bet you would when reading someone else's HN who used a different set of abbreviations than you (actually, I think even if they used the same HN as you, because you won't *know* that for quite some time), and (b) doesn't challenge my point at all. Most people *do* find reading HN harder.


Cheers,
Jim Cooper

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Jim Cooper    jcooper@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Tabdee Ltd    http://www.tabdee.ltd.uk

TurboSync - Connecting Delphi to your Palm
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