On Tue, Jan 15, 2002 at 06:30:22PM +0900, Peter Hickman muttered... : Stephan K?mper wrote: : : > The rule one of my supervisors gave me is: 'All method definitions : > shall fit into the editor window.' : > That was back in the years of 24 line monitors, any I think this : > rule is still OK - in terms of lines. : : One that was given to me (read YOU WILL DO IT THIS WAY) was meaningful variables. Which sounds like such : a great idea until you come across... : : percentageofvalidationerrorsinthedatabase = numberofvalidrecordsinthedatabase / : totalnumberofrecordsinthedatabase : : Anything more complicated starts to become unreadable very quickly (not to mention the effect of spelling : mistakes) I leave it to you to imagine what the SQL looks like, and that very rarely fitted onto a : screen. My teacher at school alway wittered on about meaningful identifiers (this was in pascal) and so I then made a point to make each variable name 256 characters. He was less than pleased - but it was readable BecauseWeHadToWriteThemLikeThis :) But even to this day I still stick to hacking out a method using bad identifiers and then go back and give them the correct names (once I actually know what they are for) - most people seem to forget the second step =P Regards, Chris -- Chris Ross (boris) [ chris / darkrock.co.uk, http://www.darkrock.co.uk ] [ (chris|boris)@ferite.org, http://www.ferite.org ] "Sign: "Salesmen welcome - dog food is expensive.""