Using camelCase for abbreviations

Each language and platform has its own coding style guide. This goes true when it comes to abbreviations. I've had some debates about whether to use JSON or Json, URL or Url, HTTP or Http.

I personally prefer camelCase, so I'm very happy to see that Kotlin is on my side. See Kotlin Style guide, I think this guide should be applied in other languages, such as Swift 😛

Sometimes there is more than one reasonable way to convert an English phrase into camel case, such as when acronyms or unusual constructs like “IPv6” or “iOS” are present. To improve predictability, use the following scheme.

Beginning with the prose form of the name:

Convert the phrase to plain ASCII and remove any apostrophes. For example, “Müller’s algorithm” might become “Muellers algorithm”.

Divide this result into words, splitting on spaces and any remaining punctuation (typically hyphens).

Recommended: if any word already has a conventional camel-case appearance in common usage, split this into its constituent parts (e.g., “AdWords” becomes “ad words”). Note that a word such as “iOS” is not really in camel case per se; it defies any convention, so this recommendation does not apply.

Now lowercase everything (including acronyms), then uppercase only the first character of:

…each word, to yield pascal case, or

…each word except the first, to yield camel case

Finally, join all the words into a single identifier.

Note that the casing of the original words is almost entirely disregarded.

Prose form	Correct	Incorrect
“XML Http Request”	XmlHttpRequest	XMLHTTPRequest
“new customer ID”	newCustomerId	newCustomerID
“inner stopwatch”	innerStopwatch	innerStopWatch
“supports IPv6 on iOS”	supportsIpv6OnIos	supportsIPv6OnIOS
“YouTube importer”	YouTubeImporterYoutubeImporter*

About iOS or IOS, I think I would go with IOS. I think React Native thinks so too

NavigatorIOS looks and feels just like UINavigationController, because it is actually built on top of it.

onmyway133 / blog

Using camelCase for abbreviations #147

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