Hungarian Notation ================== When I was learning how to program, I would occasionally come across this arcane system called "Hungarian Notation". I was told to avoid it like the plague, and I didn't believe it contributed anything valuable. My view changed after reading a few old blog posts about it: Making Wrong Code Look Wrong and Hungarian notation - it's my turn now :). It's not something I would use, but now I understand how it functions and why it existed. An interesting comment on its history from the second post: ------------ Scott Ludwig June 22, 2004 "The first one, which is the one that most people know about, is “Systems Hungarian”. System’s Hungarian is also “Hungarian-as-interpreted-by-Scott-Ludwig”. In many ways, it’s a bastardization of “real” (or Apps) Hungarian as proposed by Charles Simonyi." Hi Larry. Now I'm famous :). The story is that the hungarian bastardization originally came from the documentation folks. In the systems group we originally produced raw documentation for them that had standard "apps like" hungarian. They decided it was too obtuse for documentation so they did some serious readability changes to it. They are not programmers so this wasn't a graceful operation. This had a *huge* secondary effect because new programmers in the systems group would read the documentation and "more or less" reproduce that "documentation group" style. Not to mention books were written about the api that referenced that style. Pretty soon we had more code in this "docs group" style than in any other style. A smaller effect came from Win32 birthing. Many new kernel32 apis were created and what you see in those apis is MarkL's personal interpretation of what he read as the style in the documentation. Many "CountOfBytes" instead of "cb", "IndexOfX" instead of ix, etc. Good to hear you are still cranking away. I hope all is going well with you. -------------- Larry Osterman June 22, 2004 Wow! Thanks Scott for the clarification. I apologize for taking your name in vain, btw, I didn't have contact info for you so I didn't check it with you. I REALLY appreciate the clarification. And yes, I'm still cranking away here, I'm over in multimedia land (talk about strange journeys) but I'm still having fun. It's scary, I hit 20 years in 2 months.
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