[swift-evolution] Analysis of case conventions for initialisms

[Jordan Rose]

(re: https://gist.github.com/dabrahams/55fc5ece355da4664730)

I am very strongly in favor of convention #1, and it comes from what we were talking about offline yesterday. This is what I do pretty much automatically when coding:

Word	Lowercase	"Capitalized"	Uppercase
string	string	String	STRING
Cupertino	cupertino	Cupertino	CUPERTINO
McCall	mccall	McCall	MCCALL
HTML	html	HTML	HTML
iPhone	iphone	IPhone	IPHONE
LaTeX <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX>	latex	LaTeX	LATEX


(apologies to those reading this in plain text)

The important thing here is that the "capitalize" operation doesn't mess with the case of any other letters in the word. My preferred rules are then:

	• To form a type name, "capitalize" every component, then concatenate.
	• To form a value name, "lowercase" the first component, "capitalize" every other component, concatenate.

which is pretty much convention #1.

(My "capitalize" rule for coding breaks the rule for publication, in which "iPhone" would be the capitalized form. Without it, however, you end up with names like "isUsingiPhone" and "DefaultiPhoneViewController", which I agree are harder to read than "isUsingIPhone" and "DefaultIPhoneViewController".)

This isn't quite what Cocoa does (as noted by Dave, it prefers to not lowercase initialisms or acronyms in value names, leaving them all uppercase), but it's what I do in practice.

Regarding the other suggestions:

	• "HtmlString" (a type) makes me uncomfortable because there isn't a word "Html" or "html"; that is, it's not the output of any of my built-in mental operations.
	• "hTMLString" (a value) is nonsense to me; that's three words "h", "TML", and "String".
	• I really don't find "XmlRpcConnection" easier to read than "XMLRPCConnection". Easier to break up into words, yes; easier to recognize what those words are, no.

Jordan


> On Feb 11, 2016, at 21:51, Dave Abrahams via swift-evolution <swift-evolution at swift.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> I just posted a write-up about various case conventions for initialisms:
> https://gist.github.com/dabrahams/55fc5ece355da4664730.  I was surprised
> at how it turned out, FWIW.
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> -- 
> -Dave
> 
> _______________________________________________
> swift-evolution mailing list
> swift-evolution at swift.org
> https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution

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