Re: Check for redundancy

[Robert Thorpe]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> On 2015-06-26, at 17:01, Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> wrote:
>
>> Hungarian notation is a joke. [...]
>
> I would bet that you've never done anything in LaTeX3, have you?
>
> I agree that for high-level, general-purpose languages, HN is rarely
> a good idea.  (Though some variants, like consistent naming schemes -
> like Emacs' convention for variables ending in ‘-function’ or ‘-hook’ -
> are fine, aren’t they?)
>
> For a fairly low-level thing like TeX, in which the same thing can be
> represented in a few ways (like “\foo” versus “foo”, which is a bit like
> the symbol/string difference in Lisp), you would perish without it.

I agree, it has it's uses.

Hungarian notation was used a lot in early programs using the MS Windows API.
In that API there are quite a few situations where you want to hold the
same value in two different ways.  E.g. you want a "thing" and "handle
to a thing".  Also, there aren't as many types as there should be.  This
makes Hungarian notation useful when dealing with the API.  It can be
useful when dealing with GUI generators, but that's secondary.

That said, that's a weakness of the API.  Also, it's not useful when
you're inside the guts of your own programming.  That makes it hard to
figure out when to switch from hungarian notation back to normal naming.

BR,
Robert Thorpe