>Out director has said that we must find another way to name our variables as he finds it difficult to read. Currently we use lcMyVariable to denote a local, character variable. He would like to use MyVariable_lc instead. We were also considering lc_MyVariable and one person thought that MyVariableLC was reasonable. Any thoughts? And if this has been covered already then just point the way please. I still would like to know what others think just about this specific example though. Thanks!
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Renoir,

The one of the first things that should be decided, even before the code is written, is the naming convention. This is because once the code is written, it's nearly impossible to go back and change the convention. You might want to try to calculate the time, including the drawing up of a formal document, that this would take. From the time, you can calculate the cost. When you've done this, you'll probably have a good argument as why not to change, and we're not including any debugging time that might arise from typos, etc.

Does your director actually write code? If not, the following story might be of use. In his book, Code Complete - A Practical Handbook of Software Construction, Steve McConnell tells a story of something that happened when he was working at the Department of Defense. This is a paraphrase.

A general visited a project that was in the very early stages of development. So much so that just about everyone was involved in writing the requirements, specs, etc. The general was livid. He wanted to know why no one was writing code. He then happened upon someone who was writing a program for the formatting of the documents. They told the general that the person was writing code for the project, and the general was satisfied.