To this I would like to draw attention to the mention of context in this example, which I think is important and often looked over when naming variables. The c

To this I would like to draw attention to the mention of context in this example, which I think is important and often looked over when naming variables. The context given for maxphysaddr is that of a global variable. Pike also mentions loop indices, which have very local scope. A loop variable can be very short because you know everything about it simply by reading the few lines around it. A global must encode much more information in its name, because its context is spread globally. If the name is not good, the developer has to spend extra time looking for appropriate context, and aside from the added frustration, time is money. In some ways one could suggest that variable name length should be proportional to its scope. This isn't quite true, however, because we should then find that MaximumPhysicalAddress should provide greater value than maxphysaddr. Instead, we find that MaximumPhysicalAddress is a worse name due to its length. They are however both unambiguous and provide the same semantic information. This suggests that perhaps a rule of thumb should be that the name unambiguously encode the necessary semantic information proportional to its context, and no more. Naming is however hard, in general. It seems picking good examples is equally difficult.