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>Donald Knuth seems to disagree with them, anyway. No, he does not. Read his code, it is full of single letter variables.

• klibertp 14y ago
  Unfortunately you're right on this. I read his various works long ago and had not very accurate memory of them. As a final note in this discussion I'd like to say that you're probably misunderstanding me. I have never said that single-letter names are completely prohibited - just that they should be avoided when possible. I actually went and did some analysis on the code I think is good: Underscore.js. This is what I found. I excluded all language keywords like `var` and `if`. I then calculated how many unique names there are in the code and how many of them are 1 or 2 letters long. The result I got was 4%. I then checked how many times each of the names was used and how many times 1 or 2 letter long names were used, Surprisingly I got almost the same result - 4%. So, to conclude - if more than 4% of names you use are shorter than 3 characters than you're writing bad - or at least worse than Underscore.js - code. I'm not guilty of this, I checked my own code too. And how about you? Also, on a more personal note - you're infuriating as a adversary in the discussion because of at least three things: you only answer to parts of arguments that are convenient to you, you don't openly state assumption you're making and you're mixing completely irrelevant things into the discussion. Please improve :)