Good variable names (Was: Re: Best way to make a list unique?)

[Diez B. Roggisch]

> I'm going to go off on a tangent here and put in a plea for better
> variable
> naming.  I'm looking at the above code, and can't figure out what "res" is
> supposed to be.  Is it short for "rest", as in "the rest of the items"?
> Residual?  Result?  Restore?  Any of these seems plausable.  Not knowing
> which makes it much harder to understand what the code does.  When you say
> "res.append(e)", are you building up the result that you're going to
> return, or are you building up a list of elements that got eliminated
> (i.e. residual) because they are duplicates?
> 
> Yes, I did eventually figure it out.  It didn't even take that long, but
> this is a trivial little piece of code; it shouldn't have taken any time
> at
> all to figure it out.  All you saved by using "res" instead of "result"
> was 9 keystrokes ("ult", in three places), but it cost every one of your
> readers extra brainpower to figure out what you meant.  To quote one of
> Aahz's better signatures, "Typing is cheap.  Thinking is expensive." :-)

I usually use much more telling variable names - from the source I just
wrote a minute ago:

        self.selection_color_map = {}
        self.selection_color = (255,255,0)
        self.assigned_color_map = {}
        self.default_color = (0,0,0)
        self.known_names = sets.Set()

As you can see - no desire to shorten names. But "res" for result is as
hardwired to me as i,j,k for iterating numbers. So bear with me on this
case.

-- 
Regards,

Diez B. Roggisch