> You want names to be short, so you easily write and read them. Especially if you use them a lot, it's useful to use abbreviations, like x, e, i, z.
when I look through older C codebases (Python, Linux), I often notice the extremely short and cryptic names. I wonder whether this practice is an artefact of a time before auto-completion & automatic refactoring?
These days, you can use meaningful names without much typing. From a reading perspective, I believe that longer names (within limits) are easy to parse. Humans see words, not characters.
--
E.g. When I first understood that argc means "argument counter" and that argv stands for "argument vector" it was a little revelation to me.
when I look through older C codebases (Python, Linux), I often notice the extremely short and cryptic names. I wonder whether this practice is an artefact of a time before auto-completion & automatic refactoring?
These days, you can use meaningful names without much typing. From a reading perspective, I believe that longer names (within limits) are easy to parse. Humans see words, not characters.
--
E.g. When I first understood that argc means "argument counter" and that argv stands for "argument vector" it was a little revelation to me.