Long names are doom ?

[Roman Suzi]

On Fri, 25 May 2001, 00001111 wrote:

Hi!

I use Emacs to edit programs and it's really easy to
auto-expand names automatically, so it's not more typing.
After this I believe long names are better than
short ones. They are part of documentation.

> Hi All,
>
>  Anybody use variables/names longer than 31 character
>and finds it really useful ?
>
>Then please respond  why, where, when.
>I have folks here in comp.lang.fortran who will die claiming that they
>
>- "never seen a well written, legible program
>  that uses any identifiers longer than 18-20 characters..".
>- "long variables names are *hard* to read.  And, you have to
>  read though all the characters of every instance of them...".

Well, it the variabl is something like:

custinflngver

- it's hard to read ;-)

But if I write:

customer_info_long_version

- it's OK.

>- "it degrades the legibility of a program to use identifiers that
>  can't be easily remembered...."

It's up to name objects correctly. Once I forgot that I already have
function print_date in a module and I was very surprised that when I added
function to the end of the module, it was named print_date too ;-)

So, long names are easier to remember, if they aren't
unnecessary bloated. If they are, probably you have
more trouble than with names.

>As a result, despite 90% of computer languages have long, very
>long or 'infinite' identifiers, fortran folks seems plan to stay
>with their 6...aargh ...sorry this was just not far ago... 31 character
>limit intil year 3000.

Fortran is a special language. Nobody insist modern CPU registers
be called lenghthier than AX, EAX, ... :-)

>cheers
>
>
>Seems my ISP does not post in Phyton ng.
>Sending three times all unsuccessful
>
>

Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
-- 
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