Re: question about linker

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:

David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> writes:
>

On 03/12/2024 02:23, Tim Rentsch wrote:
>

scott@slp53.sl.home (Scott Lurndal) writes:

>

>

For the most part I don't use abbreviations in the usual sense of
the word, although I do sometimes use short non-words in a small
local context (here "short" means usually one or two letters, and
never more than four or five).

>
A general guideline followed by most people is to have the length of
identifiers (or their semantic content) increase with larger scope of
the identifier.  "i" is fine as a counter of a small loop, but you would
not want to use it for a file-scope static.
>
Which abbreviations are appropriate is often context-dependent.  As long
as the context is clear, they can be very helpful - in a genetics
program, you would definitely want to use "DNA_string" in preference to
"deoxyribonucleic_acid_string" as an identifier!

>
I agree with both of these.   In addition, when processing
character strings, I'll often use 'cp' as a character pointer.

My rule is not to use abbreviations, only words (with the
short-non-word exception noted earlier).  Widely known
and commonly used acronyms, such as DNA, HTML, or TCP,
are considered words, not abbreviations.