>In any project you'll have to explain/develop conventions.Forcing to use mdot is just as well an example of that. For fieldnames, using the three letter prefix has NOT been motivated by the var/field conflicts, but rather with the bonus that each fieldname is unique in your database. Therefore if you encounter a fieldname anywhere in SQL statements and elsewhere in your code, you know immediately where it orginates from. In SQL it will reduce the number of times to prefix fields with an alias to make clear from which table the field comes from ANYWHERE in your code.

Of course, the big disadvantage of your naming convention is that you're giving up 4 (not 3) of the 10 characters you have to name a field, meaning that you have to find a meaningful description of the field in just 6 characters.


On the readability question, when I finally bit the bullet (after being bitten too many times) and switched to using mdot, it took only a few hours before it became second nature and easily readable. It wasn't a whole lot different than adapting to IntelliSense. I've heard people say they turn off IntelliSense because it gets in their way, but I can help believing that for most of them, a few hours working with it on would solve that problem.

Tamar