hungarian notation (was Re: [albatross-users] Renaming application and execution context classes)

[Matt Goodall]

Many moons ago, I used to work with OS/2 and its APIs use hungarian 
notation everywhere so we did too. It seemed like a good idea at the 
time but as we got more "used" to it we realised that it caused more 
hastle than benefit.

The amusing thing was that we *all* sat down to come up with our coding 
standards that mandated the use of hungarian notation but over time we 
*individually*, secretly stopped using it in our code. I can't remember 
who admitted that they had stopped using it first but there were sighes 
of relief from everyone :-). I've never used it since.

- Matt

Dave Cole wrote:

>>>>>>"Matt" == Matt Goodall <matt at pollenation.net> writes:
>>>>>>            
>>>>>>
>
>Matt> Michael C. Neel wrote:
>  
>
>>>I won't admit how long I used hungarian notation...
>>>
>>>      
>>>
>Matt> Shudder. ;-)
>
>When I was learning how to be a Windows programmer in the 3.0 days I
>gave hungarian notation a try.  What I found was that I spent way too
>much time trying to work out the correct notation for a type that
>actually naming the variable.  It never stuck in my mind.  It was much
>later that I formed an opinion about the notation.
>
>Funny story:
>
>Around 1990 on one contract I worked on a system of around 200k lines
>of Pascal.  It made heavy use of hungarian notation.  People were
>constantly complaining that the use of notation and abbreviations was
>not consistent.
>
>After a while I became so sick of tripping over the inconsistent
>naming that I wrote a program to parse the entire code base and build
>a global symbol table.  The program gave you the ability to
>interactively browse all of the symbols and show you where they were
>used.  You could then globally rename symbols.
>
>After getting the program working I went through and renamed hundreds
>of symbols in a matter of hours.  The result was still hungarian
>notation, but at least most of the abbreviations were consistent.
>
>- Dave
>
>  
>

-- 
Matt Goodall, Pollenation Internet Ltd
e: matt at pollenationinternet.com
t: 0113 2252500