Concise and Consistent Naming

13 years 10 months ago

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Approximately 70% of the source code of a software system consists of identiﬁers. Hence, the names chosen as identiﬁers are of paramount importance for the readability of computer programs and therewith their comprehensibility. However, virtually every programming language allows programmers to use almost arbitrary sequences of characters as identiﬁers which far too often results in more or less meaningless or even misleading naming. Coding style guides address this problem but are usually limited to general and hard to enforce rules like “identiﬁers should be self-describing”. This paper renders adequate identiﬁer naming far more precisely. A formal model, based on bijective mappings between concepts and names, provides a solid foundation for the deﬁnition of precise rules for concise and consistent naming. The enforcement of these rules is supported by a tool that incrementally builds and maintains a complete identiﬁer dictionary while the system is being developed...

Florian Deißenböck, Markus Pizka

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