Question about “Best Coding Practices” Wiki page

[mlazovjp]

I am going through the AutoIt Wiki and soaking up a lot of great information.  On the “Best Coding Practices” page at https://www.autoitscript.com/wiki/Best_coding_practices#Scopes_of_Variables there seems to be a minor detail missing.  In the “Variable Initialization” section at https://www.autoitscript.com/wiki/Best_coding_practices#Variable_Initialization , there are references to a data type $o, but in the table listing prefixes and their data types, there does not appear to be a prefix “o”.  I assume that this is for Object?

[Musashi]

8 hours ago, mlazovjp said:

... there are references to a data type $o, but in the table listing prefixes and their data types, there does not appear to be a prefix “o”.  I assume that this is for Object?

Yes, "o" (sometimes "obj") stands for Object !

As described in the Wiki, these are 'only' naming conventions. AutoIt itself does not perform any special checks on these prefixes. So you can give a variable the name $sStringValue ($s... for string) and still specify an integer value :

Local $sStringValue = 1000

It is similar with $g_sStringValue. "$g_..." does not declare a variable in the global context. This is defined by the keyword Global ! These naming conventions only provide better readability.

Edited October 17, 2019 by Musashi

[water]

I have added prefix "o" for objects as this is widely used in AutoIt UDFs (like Word, Excel) and hence "best practice"

[mlazovjp]

Thank you, @Musashi and @water, for your explanations and for updating the table to include “object”.  I have been using AutoIt for nearly 20 years, but I hadn’t paid much attention to the coding best practices until now; I will be teaching a 400-level Computer Science special topics course that I am currently developing for this coming Spring semester, and a significant chunk of it will be focused on writing AutoIt scripts.  I am systematically reading through all of the Wiki pages for content I would like to cover in the course, and I figured it would be a good idea to make sure I understand the coding best practices as set out in the Wiki so I can teach and emphasize them early on so that we are consistent.

I love the AutoIt help file, but I am only now realizing how useful the Wiki is, too.

Reading the coding best practices Wiki makes me realize how sloppy my AutoIt code is.  I am actually excited to start using the coding best practices in my next scripts!