[ruby-talk:10455] Tendency toward shorter variable names

"Harry Ohlsen" <[e-mail]> wrote in message
news:3a773b6f.257602913@news-server...
> >Also, I notice that I tend to give ephemeral arguments one-letter names.
> >How shell-scripty!
>
> I do this too.  It's particularly interesting, since I generally use
> absolutely no other abbreviations and have argued the logic for that
> many times with other people :-).

I'm also a fan of long descriptive names when doing C++. Like
m_btnDataOutputFormat. I guess the Intellisense technology is partly to
blame but I also think there is some fundamental difference in how the
languages are treated and used.

When writing short easy to follow snippets in Ruby I tend to use m, i or
some other letter. Like

ary.each do |m| print m, "\n" end

To spell out m to member or item won't make the code easier to follow or
understand. And I just love the fact that I don't have to open a header file
and put the variable declaration in the class. Earlier when doing some RAD
for testing or building a quick foundation to test some ideas I used to code
C++ classes "inline" in the .cpp file. More similar to Java. But after
reading Pragmatic Programmer by Dave and Andy, I've got the push forward to
really think and trying to never do the same things twice. That has resulted
in building small macros and scripts that automate things. Yesterday, for
example, I created a script that builds a Win32 program in its "sharp"
version, a demo version, a helper DLL, context-help in two languages, the
demo distribution and the "sharp" distribution. If I were allowed it would
have updated our homepage and put the demo download on our Web server.

All in under one minute. The tools involved: DevStudio 6, RoboHelp HTML,
Wise InstallMaster. If anyone is using any of the tools and is interested
the script (batch file). Just e-mail me (at my work e-mail:
[e-mail]). The program is called WLinq v2.1 and will soon be
published at www.freefloat.com. It may take a while cause I don't have any
control over that :-)

/rob