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Re: Long names are doom ?

00001111 wrote:

>  Hi All,
> 
>   Anybody use variables/names longer than 31 character
> and finds it really useful ?

Yes. In Common Lisp long identifiers are often used.

Take a look in 
"The Art of the Metaobject Protocol"
to see identifiers like:

generic-function-argument-precedence-order
update-instance-for-different-class
ensure-generic-function-using-class

and I've to say it is _good_ that they are so long.
Yes you could e.g say

  genFunArgPrecOrder

But it is *much* less readable this way.

> Then please respond  why, where, when.
> I have folks here in comp.lang.fortran who claim hard that they
> 
> - "never seen a well written, legible program
>   that uses any identifiers longer than 18-20 characters..".

Nonsense

> - "long variables names are *hard* to read.  And, you have to
>   read though all the characters of every instance of them...".

see above Example "genFunArgPrecOrder"

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

6 characters? so my example would be like gFuAPO - yes _very_ readable!! ;-)

Regards,
Jochen
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