Naming convention (programming): Difference between revisions

Revision as of 02:52, 22 February 2006

Revision as of 01:51, 3 March 2006

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As most [[programming language]]s do not allow the [[whitespace_(computer science)|whitespace]] in identifiers, a method of delimiting each word is needed (to make it easier for subsequent readers to interpret those character sequences belonging to each word). There are several in widespread use; each with a significant following.

One approach is to delimit separate words with a [[alphanumeric|nonalphanumeric]] character. The two characters commonly used for this purpose are the hyphen ('-') and the underscore ('_'), eg, the two-word name ''two words'' would be represented as ''two-words'' or ''two_words''. The hyphen is used by nearly all programmers writing [[Cobol]] and [[Lisp programming language|Lisp]]. Many other languages (eg, languages in the [[C programming language|C]] and [[Pascal]] families) reserve the hyphen for use as the [[subtraction]] operator, and so it is not avaialbleavailable for use in identifiers.

An alternate approach is to indicate word boundaries using capitalization, thus rendering ''two words'' as either ''twoWords'' or ''TwoWords''. The term [[CamelCase]] is sometimes used to describe this technique.