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From: "Chris Smith" <cdsmith@twu.net>
Newsgroups: 
 comp.lang.ruby,comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.awk,comp.lang.clarion,comp.lang.java.programmer,comp.lang.pl1,comp.lang.vrml
Subject: Re: Long names are doom ?
Date: Thu, 24 May 2001 20:25:57 -0600
Organization: Altopia Corp. - Usenet Access - http://www.altopia.com
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References: <3B0DBD4A.82943473@my-deja.net>
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Date: 2001-05-24T20:25:57-06:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"00001111" <00001111@my-deja.net> wrote ...
>   Anybody use variables/names longer than 31 character
> and finds it really useful ?

Yes, I do occasionally use very long identifiers.  Normally, I do so when I
am using a lot of identifiers according to a set naming convention.  For
example, I might, in a Swing GUI application, declare an Action subclass
called:

    viewPreferencesGeneralOptionsAction

That's 35 characters.  If that's really my menu structure (that is, view |
prefs | general | options) then I really want to use that variable name.
This is not to say that I very frequently use such names, but when I need to
for consistency, I'd really hate for the language to stand in my way.

> - "never seen a well written, legible program
>   that uses any identifiers longer than 18-20 characters..".

Mostly true, but I disagree with the absolute statement.

> - "long variables names are *hard* to read.  And, you have to
>   read though all the characters of every instance of them...".

Definitely true.

> - "it degrades the legibility of a program to use identifiers that
>   can't be easily remembered...."

Definitely true.

For those reasons, I don't agree with regularly using long variable names
unless, like in the example above, they make intuitive sense and there's
some systematic reason for that name choice.

Chris Smith