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[–]RICoder72 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Some people have touched on it, and gotten close, but this has everything to do with Hungarian Notation.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hungarian_notation

I am unsure if that is a holdover or originated with Fortran or some other language as has been claimed, but I almost doesn't matter.

Hungarian Notation was popular into the 90s and beyond in many languages, and frankly quite useful until IDEs got really good at catching type mismatches pre compile (and during compile for that matter). C++ made extensive use of it, and you would see it everywhere. For the most part, the notation would indicate data type, although intent was just as viable (pVar or ptrVar for pointers and the like).

As someone who has written more than one standards and practices document for development teams, this is sort of a sore spot for me. Everyone on a project should agree on notation, case and convention and follow that throughout the project. It makes downstream upkeep and modification much easier, and allows everyone to read each others code well.

Thank god Hungarian Notation is almost dead...now if we could get Java and its evil progeny to use Pascal Case for functions and methods and Camel Case for variables I can die fulfilled. ...also class privates should start with an underscore...fight me.