Question

We have some devs on Android part of our application who actively use prefixing of class member variables with “m*”.

What is the origin of “mThis” which is basically:

class SomeClass {
    private final SomeClass mThis;
    SomeClass() {
        mthis = this;
    }
}

and this notation in general?

Answer 1

Actually I guess the question is more about the m-prefix, not the goal of having this as your own field.

So regarding the prefix, this is a coding convention used by android team: all member variables (aka fields) are prefixed with “m”. That’s it, basically. Other android developers might use it because they have browsed through android sources and have deemed it appropriate to use this convention in their own code.

BTW, it’s not common in general java programming, I believe common java coding standards usually discourage using any kind of prefixes for anything.