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Katherine Johnson’s mathematical calculations helped guide some of America’s most important early space missions while she confronted the racial and gender barriers faced by Black women in twentieth-century America.
MORE →Reflects the personal views, recollections, and perspective of the author, Mike Davis.
This is a personal recollection on the Move fire on May 13, 1985
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In computer programming, a naming convention is a set of rules for choosing the character sequence to be used for identifiers which denote variables, types, functions, and other entities in source code and documentation.
The choice of naming conventions can be a controversial issue, with partisans of each holding theirs to be the best and others to be inferior. Colloquially, this is said to be a matter of dogma.[1] Many companies have also established their own set of conventions.
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The exact rules of a naming convention depend on the context in which they are employed. Nevertheless, there are several common elements that influence most if not all naming conventions in common use today.
Some naming conventions limit whether letters may appear in uppercase or lowercase. Other conventions do not restrict letter case, but attach a well-defined interpretation based on letter case. Some naming conventions specify whether alphabetic, numeric, or alphanumeric characters may be used, and if so, in what sequence.
A common recommendation is "Use meaningful identifiers." A single word may not be as meaningful, or specific, as multiple words. Consequently, some naming conventions specify rules for the treatment of "compound" identifiers containing more than one word.
As most programming languages do not allow whitespace in identifiers, a method of delimiting each word is needed to make it easier for subsequent readers to interpret which characters belong to which word. Historically some early languages, notably FORTRAN (1955) and ALGOL (1958), allowed spaces within identifiers, determining the end of identifiers by context. Keywords in ALGOL used stropping thus distinguishing them from identifiers.[2] This was abandoned in later languages due to the difficulty of tokenization. It is possible to write names by simply concatenating words, and this is sometimes used, as in mypackage for Java package names,[3] though legibility suffers for longer terms, so usually some form of separation is used.
One approach is to delimit separate words with a non-alphanumeric character. The two characters commonly used for this purpose are the hyphen ("-") and the underscore ("_"); e.g., the two-word name "two words" would be represented as "two-words" or "two_words".
The hyphen is commonly used by when writing COBOL (1959), Forth (1970), and Lisp (1958); it is also common in Unix for commands and packages, and is used in CSS.[4]
By contrast, languages in the FORTRAN/ALGOL tradition, notably languages in the C and Pascal families, used the hyphen for the subtraction infix operator, and did not wish to require spaces around it (as free-form languages), preventing its use in identifiers.
An alternative is to use underscores; this is common in the C family (including Python), with lowercase words, being found for example in The C Programming Language (1978),[5] and has come to be known as snake case or snail case. Underscores with uppercase, as in UPPER_CASE, are commonly used for C preprocessor macros, hence known as MACRO_CASE, and for environment variables in Unix, such as BASH_VERSION in bash. Sometimes this is humorously referred to as SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE (alternatively SCREAMING_SNAIL_CASE).
Another approach is to indicate word boundaries using medial capitalization, called "camelCase", "PascalCase", and many other names, thus respectively rendering "two words" as "twoWords" or "TwoWords". This convention is commonly used in Pascal, Java, C#, and Visual Basic. Treatment of initialisms in identifiers (e.g. the "XML" and "HTTP" in XMLHttpRequest) varies. Some dictate that they be lowercase (e.g. XmlHttpRequest) to ease typing, readability and ease of segmentation, whereas others leave them uppercased (e.g. XMLHTTPRequest) for accuracy.
Some naming conventions represent rules or requirements that go beyond the requirements of a specific project or problem domain, and instead reflect a greater overarching set of principles defined by the software architecture, underlying programming language or other kind of cross-project methodology.
Perhaps the most well-known is Hungarian notation, which encodes either the purpose ("Apps Hungarian") or the type ("Systems Hungarian") of a variable in its name.[6] For example, the prefix "sz" for the variable szName indicates that the variable is a null-terminated string.
A style used for very short (eight characters and less) could be: LCCIIL01, where LC would be the application (Letters of Credit), C for COBOL, IIL for the particular process subset, and the 01 a sequence number.
This sort of convention is still in active use in mainframes dependent upon JCL and is also seen in the 8.3 (maximum eight characters with period separator followed by three character file type) MS-DOS style.
IBM's "OF Language" was documented in an IMS (Information Management System) manual. It detailed the PRIME-MODIFIER-CLASS word scheme, which consisted of names like "CUST-ACT-NO" to indicate "customer account number". PRIME words were meant to indicate major "entities" of interest to a system. MODIFIER words were used for additional refinement, qualification and readability.
CLASS words ideally would be a very short list of data types relevant to a particular application. Common CLASS words might be: NO (number), ID (identifier), TXT (text), AMT (amount), QTY (quantity), FL (flag), CD (code), W (work) and so forth. In practice, the available CLASS words would be a list of less than two dozen terms. CLASS words, typically positioned on the right (suffix), served much the same purpose as Hungarian notation prefixes.
The purpose of CLASS words, in addition to consistency, was to specify to the programmer the data type of a particular data field. Prior to the acceptance of BOOLEAN (two values only) fields, FL (flag) would indicate a field with only two possible values.
religious issues: n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off 'holy wars,' such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See 'holy wars;' see also 'theology,' 'bigot,' and 'compare rathole.'
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Source: Wikipedia. Article content is retrieved live through the MediaWiki API.
In computer programming, a naming convention is a set of rules for choosing the character sequence to be used for identifiers which denote variables, types, functions, and other entities in source code and documentation. The choice of naming conventions can be a controversial issue, with partisans of each holding theirs to be the best and others to be inferior. Colloquially, this is said to be a matter of dogma. Many companies have also established their own set of conventions.
The Leszynski naming convention (or LNC) is a variant of Hungarian notation popularized by consultant Stan Leszynski specifically for use with Microsoft Access development. Although the naming convention is nowadays often used within the Microsoft Access community, and is the standard in Visual Basic programming, it is not widely used elsewhere. The conventions are derived from an earlier set of conventions, the Leszynski/Reddick naming conventions, originally developed in 1992 by Greg Reddick. Eventually, Leszynski and Reddick had different ideas about how the conventions should be developed, and split into two separate sets of conventions, the other being the RVBA Conventions. As in all Hungarian notations, it uses prefixes (called tags) to indicate the type of objects and database development fields. The general structure of Hungarian notation (named after Charles Simonyi's native country) is to break down object names into the following elements: [prefix(es)][tag]BaseName[Suffix/Qualifier] The tags are lower case and the object name is camel case. Spaces and underscores are not used.
Programming style, also known as coding style, refers to conventions and patterns used in writing source code, resulting in a consistent and readable codebase. These conventions often encompass aspects such as indentation, naming conventions, capitalization, and comments. Consistent programming style is generally considered beneficial for code readability and maintainability, particularly in collaborative environments. Maintaining a consistent style across a codebase can improve readability and ease of software maintenance. It allows developers to quickly understand code written by others and reduces the likelihood of errors during modifications. Adhering to standardized coding guidelines ensures that teams follow a uniform approach, making the codebase easier to manage and scale. Many organizations and open-source projects adopt specific coding standards to facilitate collaboration and reduce cognitive load. Style guidelines can be formalized in documents known as coding conventions, which dictate specific formatting and naming rules. These conventions may be prescribed by official standards for a programming language or developed internally within a team or project. For example, Python's PEP 8 is a widely recognized style guide that outlines best practices for writing Python code. In contrast, languages like C or Java may have industry standards that are either formally documented or adhered to by convention.
Camel case (sometimes stylized autologically as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is a writing format practice of writing phrases with capitalized words and yet without spaces or punctuation. The practice has various names and conventions. The earliest known occurrence of a term for this style, InterCaps, was on Usenet in April 1990. The use of medial capitals as a convention in the regular spelling of everyday texts is rare, but is used in some languages as a solution to particular problems which arise when two words or segments are combined. In the scholarly transliteration of languages written in other scripts, medial capitals are used in similar situations. Medial capitals are sometimes traditionally used in abbreviations to reflect the capitalization that the words would have when written out in full, and they have come into use in unpunctuated abbreviations of academic titles, such as PhD and BSc, which now often replace Ph.D. and B.Sc. The first systematic and widespread use of medial capitals for technical purposes was the notation for chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in 1813. Since the early 20th century, medial capitals have occasionally been used for corporate names and product trademarks. In the 1970s and 1980s, medial capitals were adopted as a standard or alternative naming convention for multi-word identifiers in several computer programming languages. The use of medial caps for compound identifiers is recommended by the coding style guidelines of many organizations and software projects. Camel case has been criticized as impairing readability, as it creates long compound words strewn with capital letters.
Before the 1921 destruction of Tulsa’s Greenwood District, Black residents had created a remarkable center of business and community life. The district included stores, professional offices, entertainment venues and homes owned by Black citizens. Understanding Greenwood means learning what was built—not only what was burned.
MORE →The Greenwood District.