UPPERCASE or lowercase for Variables?

bigbankclub · 03-03-2013, 02:22 PM

Looking at internal variables these are in uppercase. Any reason why? Does it matter? If I use $USER vs $user what's the difference? The code still works. Ideally to be uniform, what would be the ideal method?

Guttorm · 03-03-2013, 04:05 PM

Hi

$USER is special, holding your username. There is nothing special about $user, you have to assign a value yourself. For readability, we should avoid using variable names in uppercase. They could be "special" or maybe get a special meaning in the future. For example this might surprise you if you don't know about $RANDOM:

Code:

RANDOM=123
echo $RANDOM

DiBosco · 03-03-2013, 06:59 PM

If I understand your question correctly...

...the naming convention is usually that capital letters indicate a #define value.

Some people like to use capitals at the start of words within the variable in the following way:

#define BUFFER_SIZE 200

char SerialDataIn[BUFFER_SIZE];

Others prefer things like this:

char serial_data_in[BUFFER_SIZE];

Qt tends to use:

serialDataIn.