How to name variables

Question

• What rules do you use to name your variables?
• Where are single letter vars allowed?
• How much info do you put in the name?
• How about for exam

Answer 1

I learned not to ever use single-letter variable names back in my VB3 days. The problem is that if you want to search everywhere that a variable is used, it's kinda hard to search on a single letter!

The newer versions of Visual Studio have intelligent variable searching functions that avoid this problem, but old habits and all that. Anyway, I prefer to err on the side of ridiculous.

for (int firstStageRocketEngineIndex = 0; firstStageRocketEngineIndex < firstStageRocketEngines.Length; firstStageRocketEngineIndex++)
{
  firstStageRocketEngines[firstStageRocketEngineIndex].Ignite();
  Thread.Sleep(100);  // Don't start them all at once. That would be bad.
}