Hungarian notation
Noun
Meaning
Hungarian notation (uncountable)
(computing, programming) A naming convention in which the name of a variable indicates its data type and intended use by including abbreviations as prefixes.
lpsz is Hungarian notation for a 32-bit pointer to a null-terminated string.
Examples
Apps Hungarian notation strives to encode the logical data type rather than the physical data type; in this way, it gives a hint as to what the variable's purpose is, or what it represents.
Hungarian notation was designed to be language-independent, and found its first major use with the BCPL programming language.
However, such prefixes were still semantic, as Simonyi intended Hungarian notation for languages whose type systems could not distinguish some data types that modern languages take for granted.
In particular, use of Hungarian notation was widely evangelized by Charles Petzold 's "Programming Windows", the original (and for many readers, the definitive) book on Windows API programming.
Hungarian notation aims to remedy this by providing the programmer with explicit knowledge of each variable's data type.
In Systems Hungarian notation, the prefix encodes the actual data type of the variable.