In computer programming a naming convention is a set of rules for choosing the character sequence to be used for an identifier.
Reasons for using a naming convention (as opposed to allowing people, eg, programmers, to choose any character sequence) include the following:
- to provide useful information to a reader, eg, an identifier's type (see: Hungarian notation) or its intended use
- to enhance clarity (for example by disallowing overly long names or abbreviations);
The choice of naming conventions can be an enormously controversial issue, with partisans of each holding theirs to be the best and others to be inferior.
Multiple-word identifiers
A common recommendation is "Use meaningful identifiers." A single word may not be sufficiently meaningful, or specific, as multiple words. As most programming languages do not allow the whitespace in identifiers, a method of delimiting each word is needed (to make it easier for subsequent readers to interpret the character sequence). There are several in widespread use; each has a significant following.
One approach is to delimit separate words with a nonalphanumeric character. The two characters commonly used for this purpose are the hyphen ('-') and the underscore ('_'), so the two-word name two words would be represented as two-words or two_words. The hyphen is used by nearly all programmers of Lisp, Scheme, and other languages that permit hyphens in identifiers. However, many other languages reserve the hyphen for use as the subtraction operator, and so do not permit it in identifiers. This solution is fairly widespread among programmers of C, Perl, and many scripting languages.
An alternate approachis to indicate word boundaries using capitalization, thus rendering two words as either twoWords or TwoWords. This is called CamelCase, among other names.
Information in identifiers
There is significant disagreement over whether it is permissible to use short (ie, containing few characters) identifiers. The argument being that it is not possible to encode much information, if any, in a short sequence of characters. Whether programmers prefer short identifiers because they are too lazy to type, or think up, longer identifiers, or because in many situations a longer identifier simply clutters the visible code and provides no worthwhile additional benefit (over a shorter identifier) is an open research issue.
There are several well known systems for codifying specific technical aspects of a particular identifier in the name. Perhaps the most well-known is Hungarian notation, which encodes the type of a variable in its name. Several more minor conventions are widespread; one example is the convention of excluding the use of lowercase letters in identifiers representing macros in C and C++.
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