[AccessD] Days Past Due - Grace Period

Hi Drew

Hmm ... nice talking, but I think you've missed the main points for
using naming conventions and prefixes. The idea is to maximize
readability of your code and ease maintenance.
Thus, the purpose of a prefix is to clarify what a variable could
contain and to eliminate code for unnecessary error checking.

It is extremely convenient to know that a variable as strStatus is a
string as you can pass it without checking for IsNull() to any
function expecting a string.
Likewise, if you retrieve values from a recordset where fields may be
empty (Null) you'll have to use a variant. Again, it is very
informative to name such a variable as, say, varSerialNo to indicate
that this variable could be Null or may contain a serial number.

If you like variables with a content following Drew's brain - which
will be a challenge for others to follow (!) - you could simply name
that variable Status which would leave no expectations for the reader
but raise a flag that caution is needed.

You know all this, I'm sure, but a strict naming convention has helped
me a lot over the years - and remember: that stranger reading your
code might very well be yourself! I think most of our fellow listers
have had the experience reading some old code of their own only to
wonder what on Earth he/she was thinking when writing that
(undocumented) code.

I know MS with .net recommends not using prefixes for variables but I
just don't understand that ...

/gustav


> I don't think I have every prefixed a Variant as var, yet.  My logic in my
> statement is I want a string, so I prefixed it as a string, but it may need
> to be a variant, so it's declared as a variant.

> Drew

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Gustav Brock [mailto:gustav at cactus.dk]
> Sent: Tuesday, September 09, 2003 3:24 AM
> To: Access Developers discussion and problem solving
> Subject: Re: [AccessD] Days Past Due - Grace Period


> Hi Drew

>> .. I left the strStatus argument as a variant, in case it is ever
>> passed a null

> Then you should have renamed it varStatus ...

> /gustav