[snip] > Question: Why doesn't the PHP community support using an Hungarian > style of programming if it prevents errors?? I've gotten too darn many
Haven't really seen this one flamed over on this list before, but maybe someone will step in an freak out later on. At any rate, you make the assumption here that Hungarian notation somehow inherently prevents errors. This is believed by some to be true, and by others, to be false. Hungarian notation does provide a set of tools for helping to prevent errors, true--but any proper coding convention does that. Past that, there is little to choose between them except personal preference. [/snip] I think that part of the problem is that many PHP developers come to programming from the largely self-taught web community (not that there is anything wrong with that). They have never programmed before (doing HTML and CSS is NOT programming) and probably have scant little experience with using databases. Therefore these folks have missed a lot of what experienced and learned programmers know and do. (See my previous rants on planning, documentation, modeling, flowcharting, etc.) These things all become especially important when you have multiple code-jockeys working the same project. You have to have checks and balances. Stating the notation style is one check, confirming at the end of the day that the variables contain what you expect them to at every step is another. It takes us a couple of extra steps to generate accountability for these things in PHP because variables are not strongly typed, but we have come up with methods to handle this. I think that it is incumbent upon those of us who have these "best practices" in place to encourage and educate those who do not. Jay -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
