Re: How to name variables in a program?


On Sun, 29 May 2005 spinoza1111@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
[...]
certain programming groups at IBM. Since Szymonyi worked in mainframe 

  Although I bet Nilges won't listen, I feel obliged to point out that
Charles Simonyi's last name is "Simonyi", not "Szymonyi". In fact, the
solitary Google hit for "Charles Szymonyi" is one of Nilges' earlier
posts!

[snip a bunch of nilgewater]

If you don't use Hungarian, then you have to THINK, what did I call
that stinky variable? If you do use the notation of the Magyars, then
you can think faster: "oh, I need that integer, what was it, tippy
typee i-n-t, oh yeah, there it is".

This is actually a decent argument for Hungarian notation, in a Microsoft Visual Studio context. It's new to me. I have noticed that
Microsoft style seems to put a lot of emphasis on /producing/ software,
rather than /reading/ software, so in that mindset it makes a lot of
sense to sacrifice a bit of readability for the ability to index
variables by type.
Where I would prefer to take the extra five or ten minutes per program to write 'width' where I mean "width," so the reader isn't burdened with
a bunch of arcane prefixes --- Nilges and other VS users might naturally
prefer to save the five or ten minutes by adjusting their naming scheme.
The reader won't thank them for 'iWidth', but in their paradigm, the
"comfort" of people reading their code is insignificant compared to the
speed of development.

(Of course, if Visual Studio let you type 'int' and up popped a list of variables /of that type/, rather than /beginning with those letters/,
the former Hungarian-notation users would have the best of both worlds! :)

signing off,
-Arthur
.