History
The original Hungarian notation, which would now be called Apps Hungarian, was invented by Charles Simonyi, a programmer who worked at Xerox PARC circa 1972–1981, and who later became Chief Architect at Microsoft. It may have been derived from the earlier principle of using the first letter of a variable name to set its type — for example, variables whose names started with letters I through N in FORTRAN are integers by default.
The notation is a reference to Simonyi's nation of origin; Hungarian people's names are "reversed" compared to most other European names; the family name precedes the given name. For example, the anglicized name "Charles Simonyi" in Hungarian was originally "Simonyi Charles" (Simonyi Károly in Hungarian). In the same way the type name precedes the "given name" in Hungarian notation rather than the more natural, to most Europeans, Smalltalk "type last" naming style e.g. aPoint and lastPoint. This latter naming style was most common at Xerox PARC during Simonyi's tenure there.
The name Apps Hungarian was coined since the convention was used in the applications division of Microsoft. Systems Hungarian developed later in the Microsoft Windows development team. Simonyi's paper referred to prefixes used to indicate the "type" of information being stored. His proposal was largely concerned with decorating identifier names based upon the semantic information of what they store (in other words, the variable's purpose), consistent with Apps Hungarian. However, his suggestions were not entirely distinct from what became known as Systems Hungarian, as some of his suggested prefixes contain little or no semantic information (see below for examples).
The term Hungarian notation is memorable for many people because the strings of unpronounceable consonants vaguely resemble the consonant-rich orthography of some Eastern European languages despite the fact that Hungarian is a Uralic language, and unlike Slavic languages is rather rich in vowels. For example the zero-terminated string prefix "sz" is also a letter in the Hungarian alphabet.
Read more about this topic: Hungarian Notation
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“The history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in natureto Berenice—although, I grant you, far superior in style and execution. I say similar in nature. You ask me in what does this nature consist? In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.”
—Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)