Re: Lua programming conventions..

["Procházka Lukáš Ing. - Pontex s. r. o." <LPr@pontex.cz>]

On Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:47:42 +0200, Patrick Gundlach <patrick@gundla.ch> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> besides that what Luigi wrote, I'd recommend the Lua users wiki. Don't take everything there as "perfect" or "the official way", as it is just a users wiki, like our wiki.
>
> http://lua-users.org/wiki/

Hello,

I'd say there is no universal naming convention.

For example I found local variables written with upper case (http://lua-users.org/wiki/AsciiMenu) ("local DASHES = string.rep('-', 80)") - it is not very common in programming to name local variables with upper case.

But in this case -
- it was probably to mark the variable as CONSTANT (as Lua doesn't have "const" keyword like C, where uppercase names are generally used for macros as constants or enums).

So:

- namespaces (modules) are generally named with lowercase names ('mynamespace.') (like in C? 'std::', 'boost::'),

- variables are generally named with lowercase names ('_' may be used inside, so we get 'myvar' or 'my_var')

- - constants with uppercase? ("local PFX = '#'"?) May be.

- - global variables? One may prefer prefixing such variables somehow, so we get '_my_pfx' (or '_MyPfx' or '_myPfx')? (In C/Cpp, personally I use the 'g' prefix and camel notation, so I get 'gMyVar', opposite to all other vars with lowercase names like 'my_inner_var'.) But if a variable is to be global, it's better to encapsulate it to a namespace; thus "mark of globality" in the name gets unnecessary as we access the variable like 'mynamespace.var' (it's obvious the variable is global for that namespace).

- functions? Naming like 'thisIsMyFunction()' (camel convention) is quite often, but one may prefer C-like naming ('this_is_my_function()' - so like internal variables?) or "TeX" convention ('thisismyfunction()') (natural to standard function, so we don't have 'string:g_sub()' or 'string:gSub()' but 'string:gsub()').

I'd say this to a wider discussion. You may get inspired from existing code as Patrick wrote, or e.g. to have a look into .lua scripts in ctx minimals.

Lukas

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