I wish I could have come up with a better example than lFile. I guess I don’t run into that ‘problem’ enough, because if I did I would have good examples aplenty. It’s one of those ‘problems’ that I see rarely, and I’m glad I have a ‘solution’ for, but the cost of all that prefixing isn’t really justified. Oh, I know the example I was trying to think of: keywords as variables. Try naming a variable ‘Replace’. I know, bad examples everywhere.

Does intellisense autocomplete variable names as you type them? If so, mine is broke and I need to get it fixed, because that would be great.

The prefixes vs suffixes don’t bother me. First, no non-alpha characters in my variable names. Characters like shift+underscore are too prone to typos for me. I read the prefixes with the variable name, so it’s not particularly cumbersome for me, e.g. ‘bee found’ or ‘ell file’.

Excel is not good at memory management, thus setting Object to Nothing helps it a lot when using extensively macros !

– Cyril.

But what I never understood, and never followed, was the concept of using prefixes instead of suffixes (eg. bFound vs found_b). Why is the type more important than the variable name itself – if you use suffixes, then starting the variable name allows intellisence to find the variable name with fewer keystrokes – and reminds you once you see the full name, what the type is – which is all I need to ensure I am using the right type. I guess for me, the efficiency of less keystrokes was a deciding factor, but I also find (and this it appears is very personal) it hard to read variable names when there are a few characters in front that have little to do with the english understanding of the variable name. Even though they are lower case, it still gets in the way of me quickly understanding what the variable is meant to be. Plus suffixes allow me to use lower case variables for local and uppercase first letter in each word, to be module or global variables – certainly redundant with the suffix, but it still adds clarity to me.

Does anyone know of a prefix/suffix interchange addin – when one has to take over someone esle’s code.

–Charlie

One Excel-relevant example I use every day is column and row numbers. They are both integers. I use the prefixes ‘col’ and ‘row’, for example rowSomething and colSomething. I use the same prefix in functions.

In my systems I have the Excel interface located in a few classes that use Excel’s 1-indexed col- and row-numbers. In the rest of my code, I use 0-indexed col- and row-numbers. In this case, Hungarian prefixes are even more useful: ‘xr’ and ‘xc’ are 1-indexed, ‘row’ and ‘col’ are 0-indexed. Clearly, these shouldn’t be mixed, and the prefixes help spot problems.

Another example is the C# DateTime structure, which can be used for either a date-only value or at date-and-time value. I use ‘date’ as prefix when the value is a date-only and ‘dti’ when the value is date-and-time. You can calculate a timespan by subtracting two ‘date’ values or by subtracting two ‘dti’ values, but you shouldn’t calculate a timespan from a ‘date’ and a ‘dti’.

I’d also make the argument that trapping exceptions due to external processes benefits from comments explaining the nature and causes of such exceptions and the reasons why the exception handler does what it does. E.g., handling results from SQL queries that return no records. Whether that’s an ‘impossible’ or possible but (presumably) rare, some explanation of why it’s handled as it’s handled is a good thing.

Remember Shift-F2!

Even your unique variable name is totally spurious, to me. Neither is a file, so sFile, lFile is bad naming, it should be Filename and FileIndex, or whatever they really are.

The imporatnt thing is a naming convention, and stick to it, a decent coder will soon get into the swing.

And you are right, comments are pointless (except the copyright notice ). As the great Smurf says, if you need comments to explain the code, it is badly written. Whenever I add comments because I think something is tricky, I invariably don’t understand it myself in 3 months. If I read someone else’s comments, I either cringe at the banality of it, e.g.

‘Close Recordset
RS.Close

or I don’t understand what they are saying. And who ever updates comments? The code never lies, comments often do.

And why have you got a picture of 2 Greek ladies on a topic about Hungarian notation?