I hinted at this during the Excel user conf the other week when I requested who used a naming convention in their Exccel VBA.
I am being very specific about what I am talking about - VBA code that sits in a spreadsheet or add-in in some business type application. Not C systems code.
Some authors suggest using a 3 letter prefix to signify the data type of a variable
so
Dim x as integer becomes
Dim intx as integer
I used to do this because of the fact that I thought it made my code look ‘more professional’, harder to read, but ‘more professional looking’. Then I read this, which totally cleared up why I didn’t like data type prefixing.
And then I read Code Complete by Steve McConnell.
Around the turn of the century Microsoft released their naming convention advice on behalf of .net (ie - business applications), which built on advice from MFC era in the ’90’s. (note the advice ‘Do not utilize Hungarian notation’ here)
My advice is simple, as well as here (near the bottom) - basically just opt on behalf of a good meaningful name. That presupposes other things like general design, procedure length etc are sensible.
I think, like in numerous things, if something works on behalf of you, then great, utilize it, if it doesn’t then don’t.
Just in case you didn’t know the VBAIDE has had the locals window feature since the last millennium:
Locals Window - clear full data type info
(You shall notice I havent discussed scope prefixes - I find them quite useful if I have to utilize non proc level variables)
As it happens I do utilize frm, qry etc in Access, but hey maybe thats just another habit I require to kick. Well, as well as hands up, I still often utilize a single letter data prefix, (s, l, d, r, etc).
So, do you utilize data type prefixes? If so why?
Do you utilize ‘Original Hungarian’ - where the prefix indicates the usage, rather than the somewhat less valuable underlying datatype?
Do you still utilize the ‘my’ prefix so beloved in MS VBA documentation (myString, myVariant, etc)? (’my’ as opposed to whose??)
Do you utilize carefully thought out, clear unambigous names?
Do you just type any old stuff in to get the thing to run?
cheers
simon
(I do all of the above!)