What exactly does this mean? How to write package names.
"Package name 'OPERATORLER' part should not start with an uppercase letter"
Kotlin Documentation Says:
Names of packages are always lowercase and do not use underscores (org.example.project).
In programming languages, it is best practice to use lowercase letters or camel case notation for package names, variable and function names. Generally, you should avoid multiword names. But always remember, class names should always start with a capital letters. These rules are not necessary to follow but it is for your convenient thats why IDE recommend this.I should recommend to follow best practices for naming conventions and all other things.
Related
In the snake_case convention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snake_case, for example, snake_case, it seems snake is a specific type of case (there is CamelCase)
Is more common to put the specific thing first? E.g., list_fruit vs fruit_list in naming variables?
Yes, for non-boolean variables it's a good practice to let the last word in the identifier be a noun which describes the variable in a general sense. In your example it would be fruit_list or simply fruits. For boolean variables it's a good practice to let the last word be an adjective; compare for instance fruits_rotten with rotten_fruits. I would say the strategy of naming and the clarity of identifiers is independent of whether you use snake case or Pascal case, or any other convention.
Here is my general strategy for naming identifiers:
Variables or functions without side-effects
Truth value -> Adjective as the last word (e.g. fruits_rotten)
Non-truth value -> Noun as the last word (e.g. rotten_fruits)
Functions with side-effects (Procedures) -> Verb as the first word (e.g. discard_rotten_fruits)
I have a problem regarding method names. My project has the following folders Physics -> Equations -> Mechanics. This is where I intend to create classes with methods that allows me to calculate various equations. The problem lies with how to give those methods meaningful names that would explain their useage. To my knowledge each and every equation doesn't come with a name that helps us differentiate between them.
I tried to give my methods names according to their endresult and it seemed working just fine however there is a limit to overloading methods. My input variables are so far only doubles.
What is the best practice to this?
From Oracle Docs:
Naming a Method
Although a method name can be any legal identifier, code conventions
restrict method names. By convention, method names should be a verb in
lowercase or a multi-word name that begins with a verb in lowercase,
followed by adjectives, nouns, etc. In multi-word names, the first
letter of each of the second and following words should be
capitalized. Here are some examples:
run runFast getBackground getFinalData compareTo setX isEmpty
Typically, a method has a unique name within its class. However, a
method might have the same name as other methods due to method
overloading.
You can use parameter types in method name: ie.
DistanceBySpeedAndTime(double speed, double time);
DistanceByAccelerationAndTime(double acceleration, double time);
I am wondering if there exists already some naming conventions for Ocaml, especially for names of constructors, names of variables, names of functions, and names for labels of record.
For instance, if I want to define a type condition, do you suggest to annote its constructors explicitly (for example Condition_None) so as to know directly it is a constructor of condition?
Also how would you name a variable of this type? c or a_condition? I always hesitate to use a, an or the.
To declare a function, is it necessary to give it a name which allows to infer the types of arguments from its name, for example remove_condition_from_list: condition -> condition list -> condition list?
In addition, I use record a lot in my programs. How do you name a record so that it looks different from a normal variable?
There are really thousands of ways to name something, I would like to find a conventional one with a good taste, stick to it, so that I do not need to think before naming. This is an open discussion, any suggestion will be welcome. Thank you!
You may be interested in the Caml programming guidelines. They cover variable naming, but do not answer your precise questions.
Regarding constructor namespacing : in theory, you should be able to use modules as namespaces rather than adding prefixes to your constructor names. You could have, say, a Constructor module and use Constructor.None to avoid confusion with the standard None constructor of the option type. You could then use open or the local open syntax of ocaml 3.12, or use module aliasing module C = Constructor then C.None when useful, to avoid long names.
In practice, people still tend to use a short prefix, such as the first letter of the type name capitalized, CNone, to avoid any confusion when you manipulate two modules with the same constructor names; this often happen, for example, when you are writing a compiler and have several passes manipulating different AST types with similar types: after-parsing Let form, after-typing Let form, etc.
Regarding your second question, I would favor concision. Inference mean the type information can most of the time stay implicit, you don't need to enforce explicit annotation in your naming conventions. It will often be obvious from the context -- or unimportant -- what types are manipulated, eg. remove cond (l1 # l2). It's even less useful if your remove value is defined inside a Condition submodule.
Edit: record labels have the same scoping behavior than sum type constructors. If you have defined a {x: int; y : int} record in a Coord submodule, you access fields with foo.Coord.x outside the module, or with an alias foo.C.x, or Coord.(foo.x) using the "local open" feature of 3.12. That's basically the same thing as sum constructors.
Before 3.12, you had to write that module on each field of a record, eg. {Coord.x = 2; Coord.y = 3}. Since 3.12 you can just qualify the first field: {Coord.x = 2; y = 3}. This also works in pattern position.
If you want naming convention suggestions, look at the standard library. Beyond that you'll find many people with their own naming conventions, and it's up to you to decide who to trust (just be consistent, i.e. pick one, not many). The standard library is the only thing that's shared by all Ocaml programmers.
Often you would define a single type, or a single bunch of closely related types, in a module. So rather than having a type called condition, you'd have a module called Condition with a type t. (You should give your module some other name though, because there is already a module called Condition in the standard library!). A function to remove a condition from a list would be Condition.remove_from_list or ConditionList.remove. See for example the modules List, Array, Hashtbl,Map.Make`, etc. in the standard library.
For an example of a module that defines many types, look at Unix. This is a bit of a special case because the names are mostly taken from the preexisting C API. Many constructors have a short prefix, e.g. O_ for open_flag, SEEK_ for seek_command, etc.; this is a reasonable convention.
There's no reason to encode the type of a variable in its name. The compiler won't use the name to deduce the type. If the type of a variable isn't clear to a casual reader from the context, put a type annotation when you define it; that way the information provided to the reader is validated by the compiler.
As a non-lisper coming to clojure how should I best understand the naming convention where vars get a name like *var-name*?
This appears to be a lisp convention indicating a global variable. But in clojure such vars appear in namespaces as far as I can tell.
I would really appreciate a brief explanation of what I should expect when an author has used such vars in their code, ideally with a example of how and why such a var would be used and changed in a clojure library.
It's a convention used in other Lisps, such as Common Lisp, to distinguish between special variables, as distinct from lexical variables. A special or dynamic variable has its binding stored in a dynamic environment, meaning that its current value as visible to any point in the code depends upon how it may have been bound higher up the call stack, as opposed to being dependent only on the most local lexical binding form (such as let or defn).
Note that in his book Let Over Lambda, Doug Hoyte argues against the "earmuffs" asterix convention for naming special variables. He uses an unusual macro style that makes reference to free variables, and he prefers not to commit to or distinguish whether those symbols will eventually refer to lexical or dynamic variables.
Though targeted specifically at Common Lisp, you might enjoy Ron Garret's essay The Idiot's Guide to Special Variables. Much of it can still apply to Clojure.
Functional programming is all about safe predictable functions. Infact some of us are afraid of that spooky "action at a distance" thing. When people call a function they get a warm fuzzy satisfaction that the function will always give them the same result if they call the function or read the value again. the *un-warm-and-fuzzy* bristly things exist to warn programmers that this variable is less cuddly than some of the others.
Some references I found in the Clojure newsgroups:
Re: making code readable
John D. Hume
Tue, 30 Dec 2008 08:30:57 -0800
On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Chouser wrote:
I believe the idiom for global values like this is to place asterisks
around the name.
I thought the asterisk convention was for variables intended for
dynamic binding. It took me a minute to figure out where I got that
idea. "Programming Clojure" suggests it (without quite saying it) in
chapter 6, section 3.
"Vars intended for dynamic binding are sometimes called special vari-
ables. It is good style to name them
with leading and trailing asterisks."
Obviously the book's a work in progress, but that does sound
reasonable. A special convention for variables whose values change (or
that my code's welcome to rebind) seems more useful to me than one for
"globals" (though I'm not sure I'd consider something like grid-size
for a given application a global). Based on ants.clj it appears Rich
doesn't feel there needs to be a special naming convention for that
sort of value.
and...
I believe the idiom for global values like this is to place asterisks
around the name. Underscores (and CamelCase) should only be used when
required for Java interop:
(def *grid-size* 10)
(def *height* 600)
(def *margin* 50)
(def *x-index* 0)
(def *y-index* 1)
There are many different styles of variable names that I've come across over the years.
The current wikipedia entry on naming conventions is fairly light...
I'd love to see a concise catalog of variable naming-conventions, identifying it by a name/description, and some examples.
If a convention is particularly favored by a certain platform community, that would be worth noting, too.
I'm turning this into a community wiki, so please create an answer for each convention, and edit as needed.
The best naming convention set that I've seen is in the book "Code Complete" Steve McConnell has a great section in there about naming conventions and lots of examples. His examples run through a number of "best practices" for different languages, but ultimately leave it up to the developer, dev manager, or architect to decide the specific action.
PEP8 is the style guide for Python code that is part of the standard library which is relatively influential in the Python community. For bonus points, in addition to covering the naming conventions used by the Python standard library, it provides an overview of naming conventions in general.
According to PEP8: variables, instance variables, functions and methods in the standard library are supposed to use lowercase words separated by underscores for readability:
foo
parse_foo
a_long_descriptive_name
To distinguish a name from a reserved word, append an underscore:
in_
and_
or_
Names that are weakly private (not imported by 'from M import *') start with a single underscore. Names whose privacy is enforced with name mangling start with double underscores.:
_some_what_private
__a_slightly_more_private_name
Names that are Python 'special' methods start and end with double underscores:
__hash__ # hash(o) = o.__hash__()
__str__ # str(o) = o.__str__()
Sun published a list of variable name conventions for Java here. The list includes conventions for naming packages, classes, interfaces, methods, variables, and constants.
The section on variables states
Except for variables, all instance, class, and class constants are in mixed case with a lowercase first letter. Internal words start with capital letters. Variable names should not start with underscore _ or dollar sign $ characters, even though both are allowed.
Variable names should be short yet meaningful. The choice of a variable name should be mnemonic- that is, designed to indicate to the casual observer the intent of its use. One-character variable names should be avoided except for temporary "throwaway" variables. Common names for temporary variables are i, j, k, m, and n for integers; c, d, and e for characters.
Some examples include
int i;
char c;
float myWidth;
Whatever your naming convention is, it usually do not allow you to easily distinguish:
instance (usually private) variable
local variables (used as parameters or local to a function)
I use a naming convention based on a the usage of indefinite article (a, an, some) for local variables, and no article for instance variables, as explained in this question about variable prefix.
So a prefix (either my way, or any other prefix listed in that question) can be one way of refining variable naming convention.
I know your question is not limited on variables, I just wanted to point out that part of naming convention.
There is, the "Java Programmers Phrasebook" by Einar Hoest.
He analysed the grammatical structure of method names together with the structure of the method bodies, and collected information such as:
add-[noun]-* These methods often have parameters and create objects.
They very rarely return field values.
The phrase appears in practically all
applications.
etcetera ... collected from hundreds of open-source projects.
For more background information, please refer to his SLE08 paper.