Hungarian Notation | Microsoft Docs
A note from Dr. GUI: Long, long ago in the early days of DOS, Microsoft's Chief Architect Dr. Charles Simonyi introduced an identifier naming convention that adds a prefix to the identifier name to indicate the functional type of the identifier.
This system became widely used inside Microsoft. It came to be known as "Hungarian notation" because the prefixes make the variable names look a bit as though they're written in some non-English language and because Simonyi is originally from Hungary.
As it turns out, the Hungarian naming convention is quite useful—it's one technique among many that helps programmers produce better code faster. Since most of the headers and documentation Microsoft has published over the last 15 years have used Hungarian notation names for identifiers, many programmers outside of Microsoft have adopted one variation or another of this scheme for naming their identifiers.
Perhaps the most important publication that encouraged the use of Hungarian notation was the first book read by almost every Windows programmer: Charles Petzold's Programming Windows. It used a dialect of Hungarian notation throughout and briefly described the notation in its first chapter.
