Hungarian Notation in C programming language

Hungarian Notation is a variable-naming convention so called in the honor of the legendary Microsoft programmer Charles Simonyi. According to this convention the variable name begins with a lower case letter or letters that denotes the data type of the variable. For example, the sz prefix in szCmdLine stands for ‘string terminated by zero’; the prefix h in hInstance stands for ‘handle’; the prefix n in nCmdShow stands for int. Prefixes are often combined to form other prefixes, as lpsz in lpszCmdLine stands for ‘long pointer to a zero terminated string’. Though basically this notation is a good idea nowadays its usage is discouraged. This is because when a transition happens from say a 16-bit code to 32-bit code then a whole lot of variable names have to be changed. For example, suppose the 16-bit code used 2-byte and 4-byte integer variables called wParam and lParam, where w indicated a 16-bit integer (word) and a 32-bit integer (long) respectively. When this code is ported to a 32-bit environment wParam had to be changed to lParam since in this environment every integer is 4 bytes long. You would agree that if we follow the Hungarian notation then we would have to make a whole lot of changes in the variable names when we port the code to a 32-bit or a 64-bit environment. Hence the usage of this convention is nowadays discouraged.