Re: Long names are doom ?

[Kilgallen@eisner.decus.org.nospam (Larry Kilgallen)]

In article <3B0DBD4A.82943473@my-deja.net>, 00001111 <00001111@my-deja.net> writes:

>   Anybody use variables/names longer than 31 character
> and finds it really useful ?

Absolutely.

> Then please respond  why, where, when.

In an Ada package automatically generated from ASN.1 specifications.
The long names contain the exact derivation of each identifier,
based on combining the names used for the ASN.1 modules from which
they are derived and their names within those modules.

> I have folks here in comp.lang.fortran who will die claiming that they
> 
> - "never seen a well written, legible program
>   that uses any identifiers longer than 18-20 characters..".
> - "long variables names are *hard* to read.  And, you have to
>   read though all the characters of every instance of them...".
> - "it degrades the legibility of a program to use identifiers that
>   can't be easily remembered...."

Yes, the identifiers are hard to read, but that is better than having
the information missing.  Recently I had the opportunity to read
some code in C that regularly exceeds a length of 31 characters.  I
tried (before I understood my compiler for C, not my native language)
to come up with shorter names for these identifiers, and found that
my human-shortened names were _never_ as meaningful as the original
for someone who understands the problem domain.

> As a result, despite 90% of computer languages have long, very
> long or 'infinite' identifiers, fortran folks seems plan to stay
> with their 6...aargh ...sorry this was just not far ago... 31 character
> limit intil year 3000.

Those who implement Ada compilers are required to support at least
200 characters.  I made the mistake of inadvertently going over that
limit on a more permissive compiler, only to redo the generator when
I tried to use the result on a less permissive compiler.  You would
be well advised to require at least the capability for a warning at
whatever the minimum number of siginificant characters is to be.