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BKeeney Briefs
Naming Conventions
Bad naming is a giveaway for bad coding
Issue: 7.4 (May/June 2009)
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 3,164
Starting Page Number: 54
RBD Number: 7417
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
This is a followup to my "Other People's Code" column. Since then I've been lucky enough to look at a few more OPC projects. The difference between one that's going to be a breeze and one that's going to be difficult is easy to spot right away: naming conventions.
If you don't have standard naming conventions in your REALbasic (or any other language for that matter) project you need to start now. I mean it. Open your IDE of choice and start looking at your variable names. Can you tell at a glance what type of variable it is? Can you tell what it does? Or do you have a bunch of x, i, y, and z's floating around in your code?
What about your editfields? Do you name them so you can tell their function or do you simply use the default name that the IDE gives you? How do you tell the difference between EditField1 and EditField2?
Literally, the first thing I do when handed an OPC project is to look at the control names. If I see EditField1 and EditField2 I will almost always turn the project down. But if I see efName and efAddress or txtName and txtAddress I know that I can figure out the code. The point is that controls are referenced in RB code all the time so if you're naming your controls so that their function is obvious, the code will be obvious too.
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