Fun With Hungarian Notation

Even though ColdFusion is "loosely typed," I've been a believer in Hungarian notation for a couple of years. It's a handy way to keep track of what data type a variable holds, and it prevents collisions with reserved words. Besides, it seems that ColdFusion's typing is getting a little less loose all the time. Here's the convention that we've settled on:

Data Type	Prefix	Example
Array	ary	aryCart
Boolean	b	bIsAuthenticated
Date	dt	dtCreated
Decimal	d	dTotal
Integer	i	iCount
Object	obj	objEmployee
Query	q	qArticles
String	s	sEmail
Structure	stc	stcGlobal

Of course, depending on your variable name, using Hungarian notation can lead to variable names like:

• bOneTime - A Boolean indicator of whether something is a one-time event, but I'm sorry. Bone time. Killed me.
• sException - A string exception. Sexceptional.

Hungarian notation. Both functional and occasionally mildly humorous.

Comments

[Phillip Senn]

Dude, you said "bone time".
hehe.
Have there been any revisions, second thoughts or controversies about using Hungarian notation?

[Charlie]

Phillip - With ten developers on our team, there are controversies when we decide to do anything. We recently considered getting away from the Hungarian notation, because as we continue to look at code-generation tools and frameworks (particularly ORMs), some of them would create field labels based on the column name in the database, and sLname isn't quite as user-friendly.
Also, looking into lazy loading, we were creating objects that initialized to empty strings, and it didn't seem right to have objEmployee = "" (not an object).
At the end of the day, we stuck with the Hungarian simply because we were all used to it. No regrets.
Of course, things can always change.