BASIC won the war, and lost all the battles: .Net has adopted
all the features that made BASIC - fully memory managed string
class, interpreted library, single basic type, etc - dumped the
ideas like prefix notation that were only there to make up for
defects in the C language definition - and given us a new C
language with all the features they laughed at.

In a language that supports memory management and ByRef variables,
where the most difficult part of programming is not keeping track
of your indirection, stack pointers, and string space, it no
longer makes sense to put the syntax annotations in the high-
visibility space at the front of the variable name.

Now, after a long detour through C, we are back were we were
with Pascal: variable names refer to the logical content of
the variable, rather than the structure of the variable.

I still use postfix notation for variable types: name$, cost%
where it helps. There should be postfix annotations for all
types /where it matters/. Unfortunately, that is one place where
..Net is still caught in the 'real-programmer' fashion. They
can't use language-supported postfix notation because C didn't
do it that way, and because BASIC did.

Instead, when they need to note information about the structure
of the element, they are typing it out, COBOL style. And it's
not that I object to COBOL: I could do object-oriented
programming in COBOL, even though COBOL was not 'object-oriented',
and you can do postfix notation in .NET, even though the language
does not support it, but in the end, it's more efficient to
have language support for features like that rather than doing
it all your self.

(david)




"Vayse" wrote in message
...
"Tim Ferguson" wrote in message
...
programming style, they have now reverted completely, and prefixes are
AbsolutelyOut for anything based on the new versions of VisualStudio --
or should that be visualStudio?


I have to do a lot of vb.net work, and I find the new naming convention a
bit awkard. New MS articles insist on dropping the o for object, as
everything is an object now. And cls for class is gone as well, of course.
But there are still some 2003 and older articles amongst the help files,
where they have different naming conventions. But thats not too bad, its
easy enough to get used to.
My old way: Dim oClient as New clsClient
New way: Dim SalesClient as New Client
It does mean thinking of names though! Like having to use SalesClient in
this sample.

What really gets me is the names on forms. So instead of gridClients, its
now ClientsDataGridView. And then theres ClientNameTextBox. Its very hard
to get used to, after years of txtClientName!
In some ways it makes sense. All your Client objects are grouped together.
But I think I'll keep to the old ways in Access. Though I may not be able
to keep up two naming conventions for ever.
Diarmuid