Comments on: Hungarian notation, what do I think?

By: Alexander Malfait

Alexander Malfait — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 08:14:10 +0000

Even for GUI controls, I’d probably not include the control type in the variable name. Say you’re accessing the “address” control, it doesn’t matter if that control is a simple textfield or a compound component with a seperate field for street, city,…

You should try to orangize your code in a way that you can do “addressField.setValue(person.getAddress())” without worrying how the field will actually process/display that data. This way you can reuse your components without actually having to think about they work internally on every usage.

By: Richard

Richard — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 10:50:45 +0000

@Kevin: agreed. I too have used hungarian notation for UI controls in the code behind ASP.NET pages, where in a single context you often have variables of different types that all share the same name — eg. txtFirstName for the textbox UI control + firstName for a string with its value.

In these situations however, I think it’s only done because you can’t have multiple variables with the same name, and you need to know which one is the control and which is the value inside. The actual type of control is of little importance: uiUsername would be just as useful as txtUsername I think.

By: ruben

ruben — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 11:40:31 +0000

And let’s not forget what happens when the type of a variable name specified with Hungarian notation changes.

By: MikeyLin

MikeyLin — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 09:16:39 +0000

I’d agree with Kevin and Johniy. Prefixes are very useful when referring to GUI elements. It allows do a find within a document of any references to GUI elements very quickly and effectively seperates those variables from those used internally to your methods etc.

By: Johniy

Johniy — Sat, 27 Jun 2009 02:05:20 +0000

@Kevin is right. You can have

labelName
editName

where the prefixes become important.

By: Kevin

Kevin — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 22:41:20 +0000

The area I find Hungarian handy is when the variable refers to a GUI control: combobox, button, text area, etc. A bit harder to make the variable name indicate what it is in those cases.