It is often a desirable practice to implement common naming conventions for application routines and for symbolic constant and variable names. The adoption of such techniques facilitates application readability and code maintenance, since the nature and role of various routines and data items used by an application may be more easily understood. This chapter proposes some naming conventions; it is not suggested that application developers should use these conventions slavishly, but that they should use the suggestions provided as guidelines in developing their own consistent set of organizational standards.
The conventions proposed herein will cover the following areas:
The conventions proposed will adhere to most "standard" C programming conventions, in that lowercase characters will be used for routine and variable names, with uppercase characters used for symbolic names and constants. Application developers wishing to use standardized naming conventions for applications written in other languages will obviously need to adapt these conventions to suit their particular language implementation.
The conventions proposed herein will also use a notational concept known as Hungarian notation, named for its inventor, Charles Simyoni. Under this notational system each variable, symbolic name or procedure name is prefixed by a one-, two- or three-character mnemonic that indicates its type or function.