Coding standard: Prefixing variables to indicate datatype

[Jonathan P.]

"David LeBlanc" <whisper at oz.net> wrote in message news:<mailman.1042763431.24621.python-list at python.org>...
> Charles Semonie (sp?) said he rued the day he ever even thought of
> "hungarian" notation, let alone foisted it upon an unsuspecting developer
> world.
> 
> Plain and simple it's bad programming practice. Among other things, it
> encourages bad names for variables and focuses more on the data's type then
> it's use.

I first encountered Hungarian notation in a Byte article
written by Simonyi himself.  Couldn't make much heads or 
tails out the article and frankly was annoyed at how
complicated it seemed (and how much grief it gives to the
programmer).  That annoyance at the article turned to 
real world frustration when trying to program for Win32.  
The idea of Hungarian notation as practiced by Microsoft 
is really _ugly_.  Interestingly enough, I always rail 
against Hungarian but actually found elegant the way
it was used in Motif.  Go figure...

> Hungarian notation is much less useful in Python than in 
> other languages

Interestingly enough, I have always mulled that some kind of
variable naming convention might solve the problem that Python
has of not being able to check for type-conformance of calls 
during compile time.  I could not come up with a solution that 
was compelling enough to adopt though.  And something like 
Pychecker, especially if and when incorporated into the compiler, 
might be the best way to solve to deal with the sort of problems
that Python has which which statically typed languages do not.