Re: Hungarian notation

[Richard Riehle <rriehle@nunic.nu.edu>]

On Thu, 16 May 1996, mAg wrote:

> Hungarian Notation is an excellent concept, but I am sure that it will be
> appreciated only by the programmers who have to work with serious code and
> maintain it for years. For others who write smaller programs, it may not
> even be necessary, because there is not need to convey the implementation
> specific stuff in the variable name, because they can shout and ask the
> other programmer in the next office...

  I initially disliked Hungarian notation.  But I have been programming
  long enough to know that my first impression of a new idiom is almost
  always influenced by my most current experience.

  Apparently,  Hungarian notation was invented in one department at
  Microsoft to help solve the traceability problem.  It apparently did
  well what it was supposed to do. Traceability in large-scale or
  complex C programs has always been a bit dicey.

  The question is whether we still have that original problem to solve.  I
  believe that traceability is not as much of a problem in Eiffel, Ada,
  or even C++. Fortunately, Eiffel and Ada can simply ignore Hungarian
  notation except when interfacing with C routines.  C++ remains mired in
  the tarpits of its ancestral language, C, so it is not easy to ignore
  the large body of code already develped using Hungarian notation.

  In any case, this notation is not so terrible as to cause permanent
  psychological damage, so I suggest we might as well just get used to it
  when we have to code in C or C++. Bring a sense of humor to it, and
  simply think of it as a "quaint" artifact of an earlier time.

  Richard Riehle