Naming conventions [was: Food Fight]

Dennis Brown see3d at writeme.com
Sun Jul 3 22:02:22 EDT 2005


Thanks for looking at it Ken,

On Jul 2, 2005, at 11:14 PM, Ken Ray wrote:

> On 7/2/05 4:59 PM, "Dennis Brown" <see3d at writeme.com> wrote:
>
> Looks good to me, Dennis... and as long as you remember that  
> variables that
> end with "W" still are truly global until this gets implemented at  
> RunRev,
> you're in good shape.

Yes, I will be careful with my own stacks.  I don't expect anyone  
else will be using my crazy scheme and misspelling their global names  
with an extra "W" at the end of them for a wile at least.  As soon a  
RunRev makes a stack level global, I will make an edit pass to fix  
all the lines that have a comment of "--fix".

> I, too, read my code out loud in my head, but I guess I'm just so  
> used to
> Hungarian Lite that it just "sounds right" to me.

I expect that if I had experience with the strongly typed languages  
(instead of assembler (where operators determine the type --not  
data), and high level languages that are typeless), I might find it  
more "natural".  I am sure that if I forced myself to use Hungarian  
for a year, I would also get comfortable with it.  However,  X-Talk  
languages are natural English languages.  I ask my wife to read the  
Clock script I wrote.  She was able to read it and understand how it  
worked without ever seeing Transcript before.  It would not have been  
so easy if the variable names did not "read" right.  Transcript does  
not require any such notations in variables in order to work, nor has  
it traditionally been documented as needing these.  It does not  
really matter if you junk up a cryptic language with more cryptic  
stuff, but it does matter if you take a non-cryptic language and make  
it cryptic.  In fact, I would wager that if the inventor of the  
Hungarian notation started with Transcript and wanted to solve the  
same problems for Transcript, that it would not look like the current  
Hungarian notation.  However, from reading the many posts on this  
thread, I realized that there were advantages to adding some tags to  
variable names.  So, I set out to gain the important advantages of  
the Hungarian notation in the least invasive way to the readability  
of Transcript for my own style.

> Anyway, as long as it is consistent and works for you...

I really appreciate the support from everyone looking and making  
helpful suggestions about my "deviations" from the norm, instead of  
just saying "Don't re-invent the wheel, we have a perfectly good one  
already".

Thanks,
Dennis



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