Hi Ben.

>If one is writing the code for himself, others will have no say about his coding convention. However if the code is written for others, particularly the customers who buy the product, the programmer is responsible for eliminating foreseeable crashes.

Yes, I agree. A, in my opinion, very important aspect whether or not to use "m." is whom are you writing code for. I write code that is used in a variety of different projects by many different developers each with their own naming convention. Using "m." for me is a matter of stability. Performance, though, is a secondary issue. If there's no concrete need to optimize a particular code block, for me performance comes after stability and maintainability. That is, I do like to save a few nanoseconds just like anybody else, but only if this doesn't affect the other two more important rules.

Some of my clients are not using "m.", because they are the only ones working on the project (besides me). Moving code from such a project into a completely different project written by another developer almost never happens. In such situations it's probably more important to stay consistent. As long as you follow your rules consistently, it often doesn't matter what the rules are.