Naming conventions are important in any platform. If the naming conventions are followed in the library
and by the developers of a project, you can remember the name of method, variable or whatever much
better. This increases you productivity and the joy in your work, which is of course the most important
thing in life.
Checking the name of a method in the documentation or source-code is quite tiresome. If you know the
naming-scheme you only have to know the 'semantic' name of a method and you don't have to worry about
the concrete syntax, which you can compose from the semantic name and the convention of the platform
you are using.
Syntax
Strategies and rules
Naming conventions can be separated in conventions for the syntax of a name and conventions for the scheme
of a name for a specific type of strategy. The conventions for the syntax of a name deal with the usage of dashes, underscores, lowercase, uppercase and so on. The conventions of the names themselves deal with standard name construction, indicating the 'kind' of the item (like is, set and get in the library of the
JavaLanguage?)
In Stratego there are two important conventions for the syntax of names:
- Names of strategies are written in lowercase where indiviual words of the name are separated by dashes. Examples:
int-to-string, map, eval-exp.
- Names of rules are written in CamelCase?. Examples:
EvalExp, Desugar, Inline, TcExp
Futhermore overlays are written like constructors, which are written in
CamelCase?. Examples:
BinOp,
VarDec,
Call.
Modules
to do.
Naming scheme
A naming scheme is helpful because it is a first indication of the task of a strategy. For any language
holds: be precise and clear but prevent being to verbose.
Test-strategies
The first task that comes in mind is testing. Test-strategies verify whether the current term satisfies
some condition or not. Test-strategies fail when the term doesn't satisfy the condition and leave the
current term untouched otherwise. Test-strategies should be called
is-*. Examples:
is-int,
is-list,
is-Exp,
is-Declared.
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MartinBravenboer - 05 May 2002