Intentional misspellings to avoid reserved words

Posted by Renesis on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Renesis
Published on 2011-03-25T19:46:09Z Indexed on 2011/07/01 0:29 UTC
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coding-style

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variables

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readability

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variable-naming

I often see code that include intentional misspellings of common words that for better or worse have become reserved words:

klass or clazz for class: Class clazz = ThisClass.class
kount for count in SQL: count(*) AS kount

Personally I find this decreases readability. In my own practice I haven't found too many cases where a better name couldn't have been used — itemClass or recordTotal.

However, it's so common that I can't help but wonder if I'm the only one? Anyone have any advice or even better, quoted recommendations from well-respected programmers on this practice?

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