Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!swrinde!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!excelan!donp
From: donp@na.excelan.com (don provan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Variable Name Conventions
Message-ID: <983@excelan.COM>
Date: 19 Jan 90 21:56:32 GMT
References: <36190@cornell.UUCP> <1990Jan19.183036.24440@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@excelan.COM
Reply-To: donp@na.excelan.com (don provan)
Organization: Excelan, Inc., San Jose, Califonia
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>There is also the
>convention of starting structure member names with xx_, where xx is
>an abbreviated version of the structure name, but that's largely an
>artifact of now-obsolete namespace structure in early compilers.

Henry, you've said this several times recently.  It just isn't true.
There are many advantages to this convention.  The most obvious is
that, while it's easy to find all occurrences of "xx_len" in a large
body of code, it's difficult and meaningless to find all occurrences
of "len".

Personally, i think it would be more accurate to say the convention of
NOT having structure ID in field names is largely an artifact of
now-obsolete programming practices which emphasized brevity at the
expense of maintainability.

						don provan
						donp@excelan.com