VBCorLib for VB6

Thursday, April 07, 2016

Renaming for Clarity

When I started VBCorLib all those years ago I was trying to match class names with .NET as much as I could.  As it turned out, VB6 already had already taken a few names for itself, leaving me with some naming decisions. Well back then, I was associating VB6 names a bit more with the dark world of C/C++ and ended up prefixing my class names with the letter 'c'. This led to the atrocious cString, cArray and cDateTime classes. Seeing their usage such as cString.Format or New cDateTime simply ground on my spine. Something feels dirty when using prefixes like this. It was even hard to type those names when using them in my projects.

Heading into this version 3.0 revamping of VBCorLib, I decided that there would be some major breaking changes. This is allowing me to refactor the code, but also the interfaces and names. And I haven't been going easy with the breaking changes. Everything has been a target. I could remove those terrible Hungarian notations with class names. I wanted to align the classes with VBCorLib so I used the name prefix I had used to provide easy access to constructors, the Cor prefix. So now those original class are CorString, CorArray, and CorDateTime and even though they are a couple letters longer, their spelling and appearance feel more natural for this library.