From: Avdi Grimm Date: 2008-07-25T13:02:10+09:00 Subject: Re: inline comments in future release? On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 11:22 PM, Peņa, Botp wrote: > indeed, but as i said, i _prefer_ short _variable_ names. I am relaxed on object and methods names however, eg, attributes may be more descriptive ... Look out, classic appeal to authority coming up: "Names that are too short don't convey enough meaning. The problem with names like X1 and X2 is that even if you can discover what X is, you won't know anything about the relationship between X1 and X2... Gorla, Benander, and Benander found that the effort to debug... was minimized when variables had names that averaged 10 to 16 characters (1990)" -- Steve McConnel, Code Complete "A name should be informative, concise, memorable, and pronounceable if possible" -- Brian Kernighan and Rob Pike, The Practice of Programming IIRC The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt contains similar advice, but I don't have a copy of it handy (it stays by my desk at work). It is worth considering that if your favored style leads to unclear code in your favored language, it may be time to reconsider your favored style. Consider also that your clarifying comments may become obfuscating comments when a global search and replace replaces the variable name but not the comment. -- Avdi Home: http://avdi.org Developer Blog: http://avdi.org/devblog/ Twitter: http://twitter.com/avdi Journal: http://avdi.livejournal.com