"Jeffrey R. Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org> wrote in message 
news:Y9Imk.287972$yE1.85979@attbi_s21...
> amado.alves@gmail.com wrote:
>> IIRC the rationale for "index : anIndex" is that it sounds like
>> English "index is an Index". Natural language syntax is a bitch!
>
> "Index is an index" is at best a tautology and at worst meaningless; in 
> other words, this approach adds no value. Yet another mindless rule to 
> avoid the effort of thinking up good names.
>
> "Index" is a poor variable name. What is it the index of?
>
> First_Comma : Index_Value;
> Start_Position : Index_Value;
>
> and so on. Good names add information.

Funny, with my simple example of anIndex you comment that anIndex is 
meaningless and go on to use Index_Value as being more informative.  Your 
example is to simple and worthless as well.  All variables contain values.

Perhaps a better example is more like:

  lengthIndex : aLengthTableIndex;

is more useful.

And yes the way I read it is in the natural language way:

  lengthIndex is a length length table index.

I've seen code that uses the a prefix on variable names.  After getting used 
to the opposite convention it makes it hard to read.

Personally I prefer the _Type and _Acc_Type suffixes.

One other thing to note: Once I got used to reading and writing code using 
these conventions, I found:
  1) It makes reading code that follows these conventions a lot easier
  2) It makes reading code that does not follow these conventions harder 
(you get used not having to infer based on context).

Regards,
Steve

>
> -- 
> Jeff Carter
> "To Err is human, to really screw up, you need C++!"
> St�phane Richard
> 63