>>Don't you ever work with other people's code or go back to your own code much, much later? That's when naming conventions shine. When I can pick up a piece of code I wrote 5 years ago and immediately know the data type of the variables involved, I save a lot of time and energy and am much less likely to make mistakes in modifying that code.

Hi Tamar,

I can't believe there's even a debate on this issue. Naming conventions are a MUST as far as I'm concerned. I can easily read my code and the code of others and know what's going on. We also adhere to a strict naming convention for our tables -- each table uses a unique 3-character prefix for all fields in the table. This naming convention makes it EXTREMELY easy to know exactly where a piece of information came from .. and to know exactly what the name of a field is without having to look it up. It really helps with bringing new developers up to speed very quickly.

Cathy