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Naming conventions are general rules applied when creating text scripts for software programming. They have many different purposes, such as adding clarity and uniformity to scripts, readability for third-party applications, and functionality in certain languages and applications. They range from capitalization and punctuation to adding symbols and identifiers to signify certain functions.
Techopedia Explains Naming Convention
A naming convention can include capitalizing an entire word to denote a constant or static variable (which is commonly done in Flash programming), or it could be a simple character limit in a coding language (such as SQL). Naming conventions have functional as well as organizational qualities. Some scripting languages, for example, nullify character groups that are preceded by a number sign (or hashtag). Coders often use that in order to write notes into their scripts that do not interrupt the encoding, or create temporary placeholders for hypothetical pieces of code.
Often, the uniformity of naming conventions is useful not only for visual scanning, but also for searching scripts with text editors. Word processing programs are often equipped with tools that can filter, highlight and edit pieces of a document that have certain qualities (such as an underscore prefix), which makes it easy to make extensive edits over a long and complicated script that includes conventional names.
