There have been many approaches to creating names, including CamelCase and Hungarian notation.
A longtime PL/SQL Challenge player, John Hall, offers a very different approach:
Identifiers can be considered a form of documentation, which raises the question, "What should an identifier's name document?"I propose this core principle: "Identifier names are based solely on the problem domain concept." No prefixes for scope. No suffixes for type.
In other words, while I would usually write a block of code like this:
DECLARE
TYPE employees_t IS TABLE OF employees%ROWTYPE;
l_employees employees_t;
BEGIN
SELECT *
BULK COLLECT INTO l_employees
FROM employees;
END;
John would, instead, do the following:
DECLARE
TYPE employee_table IS TABLE OF employees%ROWTYPE;
all_employees employee_table;
BEGIN
SELECT *
BULK COLLECT INTO all_employees
FROM employees;
END;
He's already got me thinking differently about how to write my code, though I am not yet ready to force my fingertips into drastically different patterns of typing.
I encourage you to visit the Roundtable, check out the discussion, and add your own thoughts.
