Coding Standards - A Taste of Standards
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The time has come to actually demonstrate some of the standards so you can better understand their usefulness and the advantages of a standardized code snippet. Here we go...
There are two types of naming standards accepted - Pascal casing and Camel casing. Each of them is recommended for a few situations, but before we venture into that, take a look at the differences between them.
Pascal casing -- First character of all words are upper case, while other characters are lower case.
Camel casing -- Each word has its first character upper case, except the first one, while the rest of the characters are all lower case.
YourName // Pascal casing
yourName // Camel casing
Use Pascal casing for class names, method names, and file names. Camel casing will be used for variable names, method parameters, and with an I prefix in the case of the interfaces. This way when you see a name without its declaration, you should already know what you are dealing with. As a side note, we can add that the Hungarian notation shouldn't be used anymore for variable names. Microsoft gave up on this at the introduction of .NET; instead, the Camel is preferred.
Always -- and I mean always -- figure out and use a meaningful name. When someone looks at it, s/he should already know its purpose. Do not use single character names; however, this rule can be violated in the case of the index loop variables. In any other situation a meaningful and self-explanatory name is the nicest way. For example, defining a variable that will hold a book's title as BookTitle is more advisable than naming it m23. The first path will result in code that is instantly perceived, even after ten years. Also for identifying a member variable quickly, use the ' _ ' underscore character in front of it, so logically it won't appear at any local variables.
The use of prefixes is also a good thing. Insert the Is prefix in front of a Boolean type to indicate its type, and if you're using a user interface, then use the appropriate prefix for it. Look at some examples for these situations:
string _BookTitle; // and not ->> string m23;
int index; // for a local variable
for(int j=0;j<index;j++); //here the single character usage is permitted
Boolean IsTakenOut;
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