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Program Code Spell Checking

Thu, 2008-04-24 15:31 — jason

I had noticed some references lately from Stroustrup (the inventor of c++) about not liking camel casing. He prefers underscores between words in variable names: myFunctionName vs my_function_name. The best reference I can find to this is from Stroustrup's C++ FAQ page.

I initially disagreed with him, having grown up first with BASIC, moving to Java and C++ later. However, while mocking up some C++ code in a Google Docs document I discovered something quite by accident: underscores work with spell checking!

I had always thought that spell checking program code was futile. However, a properly configured spell checker could be set up to ignore single character "words" and treat "_" characters as spaces. In fact, the spell checker built into Firefox is configured this way by default.

I'm now sold on doing personal development with underscores separating words in variable/function/class names, so that it will be possible to run a spell checker against my code, and increase the professional feel of it.

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