NYCPHP Meetup

[tedd]

At 6:34 AM -0400 9/27/06, Peter Sawczynec wrote:
>So I'm just asking for an opinion, do you deal with spaces in variables?
>Never use spaces?

Peter:

Opinions?

It depends upon what _you_ want to see in _your_ code, unless you're 
working with a team. I've seldom worked with a team, so I'll leave 
that to others to comment.

I use mixed case (i.e, pageNum). I try to keep my variable names 
short and to the point. I never use spaces -- besides, spaces aren't 
consistently allowed anyway.

I try to keep the variable name the same across different languages 
(i.e., $pageNum - php, pageNum - MySQL).

With counters and other temporary/short-scope variables I use i, j, 
k, l (left over from my FORTRAN) days, which is one of the reason I 
use lowercase. Likewise, I never use i, j, k, l for anything but 
short-scope variables.

You say: "To me, spaces is what makes data names human readable."

Not for me, spaces mean to me that these data names aren't variables. 
Just give me a variable that looks like a variable; and a name has 
some relationship to the data they hold; and I'm happy.

If you want to see a problem with names, trying reviewing some of the 
constants that Apple has for it's development (I'm sure they are not 
alone) -- they are approaching the limits for name length.

Another consideration, while I've never had to do it for php, I've 
worked with variable names that were further identified by their 
prefix, such as gPageNum -- meaning that it was a global variable. If 
you have a very large project, you might want to consider using a 
prefix for naming, such that you would know where the variable 
originates.

Chris Shifett (in his book Essential PHP Security -- in my mind, 
required reading) used "$clean" for variables that were sanitized -- 
not a bad idea. I would consider expanding that idea by adding a "c" 
to the front of a sanitized variable, such as $cPageNum.

In any event, whatever scheme you adapt, you're the one who will have 
to live with it. The more consistent and easy for you to identify and 
work with, the better.

A long time ago, a mentor once told me "Be careful picking your 
religion, because you're the one who has to live with it." Wouldn't 
it be interesting if what we believe is what it is?

tedd

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