Hungarian Notation

re: Hungarian Notation

David Cumps — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 23:12:00 GMT

how about, intX and intY? no more "i" ;)

re: Hungarian Notation

Raymond Chen — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 23:37:00 GMT

I think you nailed it, Rick. People misunderstood Simonyi-style HN; in particular, it appears that Petzold did and popularized it though his books. So now everybody's primary exposure to HN is the Petzold style instead of the classic Simonyi style. And I don't blame them for hating it.

It's Gresham's law: Bad drives out good.

re: Hungarian Notation

Larry Osterman — Sat, 14 Feb 2004 23:58:00 GMT

The other thing to keep in mind is the difference between "Apps" hungarian and "Systems" hungarian. Apps hungarian (also known as Klunder hungarian) is the brand of hungarian in Doug Klunder's hungarian naming convention memo. This is pretty close to the pure Simonyi hungarian (although the Klunder memo isn't clear if the prefix represents the type or the usage of a variable (consider a char * that's used as an array of characters - is it a sz or is it an rgch?).

Systems hungarian (also known as Ludwig hungarian) is the hungarian that the User team (led by Scott Ludwig) in Windows adopted for Windows 3.1. That's the brand of hungarian that's used for many of the Windows headers, and is used for Petzolds book. Systems hungarian is where you get wparam and lparam.

It's not surprising that when Dave Cutler ran into Hungarian for the first time he declared it an abomination and banned it from the NT tree.

Personally, I prefer Klunder's hungarian (with some modifications since Doug's paper's from 1989ish, and predates C++).

re: Hungarian Notation

Rick Schaut — Sun, 15 Feb 2004 04:22:00 GMT

Someone misrepresenting himself as an emplyee of Microsoft wrote:

"Hungarian is only a kludge for the development environment.

"Now we have Intellisense, HN makes code like VB and COBOL, UNREADABLE due to the spam of TLAs.

"For unmanaged code its pretty accepted to use HN but nowdays with better IDEs I now dont see the need. HN also gets in the way of well known terms, or formulas.

"Can you imagine C = A+B becoming iC = iA+iB, or worse. it starts to lose its meaning for those well known terms. I sit down in the debugger with non developers for specalist implementations of formulas etc and HN is a no no there.

"HN is dead.

"Preprocessor DEFINES_BLAH_BLAH and MACROS_BLAH_BLAH along with HN are DEAD. They are a relic of the past and should be put to rest even in C/C++ and other unmanaged codebases.

"Kill it."

He later added the following:

"Why not use camelCase and PascalCase as you would on C# in C/C++ ?

"Both have the same issues for language maintainability and readability, there is no difference, we have to cast in both languages. They are both type based languages.

"Look at camelCase/PascalCase code readability compared to HN code.

"HUGE difference. How often have you look at C++ code and just scratched your head trying to fight through the prefixes, macros and defines to see the actual REAL solution its implementing."

Due to this individual's misrepresentation of his identity, I've deleted the original entries, but requote them here to preserve the substance of his remarks.

re: Hungarian Notation

Brad Abrams — Mon, 16 Feb 2004 05:39:00 GMT

The .NET Guidelines you reference only talk about publicly exposed surface area... what you do in your own code is up to you... I choose not to fight that battle.. :-)

re: Hungarian Notation

Kiliman — Thu, 20 May 2004 19:12:00 GMT

Considering that Petzold has had a lot of influence on Windows developers over the years, I was curious as to what he's been up to lately.

Curiously, I haven't found any blogs or other writings that are recent. His website www.charlespetzold.com hasn't been updated in a while.

I downloaded the companion code from his book "Programming in the Key of C#". Not surprisingly, he continues his use of A-HN in the sample code (sorry for bad formatting):

static void DisplayLine(int i)
{
const int iWidth = 60;
string strDots = new string('.',
iWidth - (i + 1).ToString().Length
- astrChapter[i].Length
- aiPageNumber[i].ToString().Length);

Console.WriteLine("{0}. {1}{2}{3}",
i + 1, astrChapter[i], strDots, aiPageNumber[i]);
}

Hungarian Notation (Again)

Buggin' My Life Away — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 11:21:00 GMT

Hungarian Notation (Again)

Buggin' My Life Away — Sat, 12 Mar 2005 16:22:00 GMT

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PingBack from http://www.progprog.com/articles/2006/10/13/still-searching-for-that-silver-bullet

Hungarian Ducks

Hungarian Ducks — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 00:25:44 GMT

PingBack from http://talklikeaduck.denhaven2.com/articles/2007/04/09/hungarian-ducks