Steven D'Aprano wrote:
> On Thu, 21 Oct 2010 12:49:47 +0000, Neil Cerutti wrote:
>
>> _The Practice of Programming_ has this right. In general the bigger the
>> scope of a variable, the longer and more descriptive should be its name.
>> In a small scope, a big name is mostly noise.
>
> Thank you! The scope of the variable is an important factor.
Wittgenstein remarked somewhere* "...it is the particular use of a word only
which gives the word its meaning...". For a variable, if you can see the
entire use at a glance, then any other cues to its meaning, like a long
variable name, are redundant.
Long variable names can lie; they share this ability with comments. The one
study** I've seen of newbie errors observed the #1 error being as assumption
that descriptive variable names could somehow replace computation, e.g. that
if you called a variable "total_sales", then accessing it would get you a
sales total, regardless of what you might or might not write as
computational statements.
Mel.
* "somewhere" hah! I covertly looked it up. It's in the _Blue and Brown
Books_.
** This I haven't looked up. It got some publicity a year or so ago. It
started when somebody gave a mid-term computer science test to a class who
had only just started the course. Then they studied the results to find out
what the students might have been thinking.
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