My naming convention

[Richmond]

On 07/10/2010 08:44 PM, Francis Nugent Dixon wrote:
> <snip>
>
> Naming conventions are personal. They are
> mostly designed to help YOU, maintain and
> modify YOUR scripts in the future, if you
> ever NEED to return to them !

1. Good point.

>
> Forget naming conventions, and spend a little
> time with comments. It beats naming conventions
> every day. If anybody will ever read it except you !

2. Aaaah; at that "august' institution, the University of Abertay, the 
lecturers
were continually rabbiting on about what they termed 'the number 10 bus' 
problem.

Their scenario was that were you coding for an employer and you were run 
over by a bus,
if you did not:

2.1.  Pepper your code with comprehensive, comprehensible documentation

and

2.2.  Use some sort of standardised naming conventions

whichever employee was given the task of continuing your work would find 
it well-nigh
impossible to understand your work.

I can see their point.

>
> If you ever have to return to your scripts
> (and I doubt that you do this often), 

3. Every day I return to my scripts; my Devawriter and Devawriter Pro 
stacks contain
scripts of up to 2000 lines of fairly complex stuff. What with teaching 
in my EFL school,
lecturing at the University, running around sorting out people's 
hardware problems, cooking,
cleaning the loo, speaking 4 languages on a daily basis, and so on; I 
do, often lose track
of what, exactly some variable or constant was supposed to be doing very 
quickly indeed.

> you
> either recognize your coding, and your coding
> knowledge, AND YOUR COMMENTS, and so you don't
> need to invent a complex naming convention,
> or else it is not your script,

4. Ha, ha, ha! I returned to a script I wrote 7 years ago, just the 
other day,
  and had a really tough time working out what I had been trying to 
achieve: ther
having been a lot of water under the bridge since then, and, owing to my
increasing comfortableness with RunRev coding, a complete change in the way
that I code.

> and HIS naming
> convention is of no help whatsoever.
> But by the saints, an intelligent comment is !!!

5. Yes, agreed: mind you what Richmond(2003) [mayne THIS is what 'HIS'
refers to . . .  :) ] and Richmond(2010) understand what constitutes
"an intelligent comment" is also a bit problematic.

>
> I spent years (with Hypercard) inventing a simple
> and strict naming convention WHICH I MYSELF
> RENAGUE ON EVERY DAY !
>
> So - what is the point ?
>

The point is that this morning somebody made some comment
about naming conventions, and, I, being what I am, could not
resist taking the bait.

HOWEVER; as many RunRev programmers have offerings on both
the old and the new revOnline repositories, and in various other places
on the internet, it might be easier for newcomers to RunRev to
"ease into" RunRev if a standardise naming convention were used.

sincerely, Richmond.