Bill: Nope, hadn't heard that story before. I think I side with you -- I want the variable names to actually mean something. And I never use underlines, too hard to type.
Karen > Many years ago (like 12 or 18 years ago), David Blocker and I competed in a > Data Based Advisor magazine RAD competition, using R:BASE. We had never > programmed together on a project before we arrived in Atlanta for the > contest. > When the bell rang in the morning, we tore open the specifications, divided > up > the work, and started programming. It was a Habitat for Humanity > volunteer-tracking database application. > > > It turned out, David liked very short variable names, 2 or 4 characters, > because he could type them faster, and was less likely to spell them wrong. > (vA, > vB, vC, vD) I tended to use all 18 characters available, partly because I > can type fast, and partly because I get confused so easily. > (vNextValueInLoop, > vExitValueForLoop, vDefaultVolunteerHrs) He was as upset with my code as I > was with his. (And neither of us was quite as bad as those examples.) > > > Needless to say, our lack of a standard worked against us. When the > finishing gun sounded and we had to hand the floppy disk to the judge, we had > a great > implementation of the spec. Unfortunately, we failed to properly initialize > some variable somewhere, and the judges reviewing the app never could link to > all the cool stuff we had finished. > (We still finished well compared to many many teams, but well out of the > money.) > > > Bill >
