Code Craft

What Do We Name?

In this chapter we’ll spend some time thinking, as programmers, about what we name and how we name it. First: What? The things we name most often while writing code are:

• Variables

• Functions

• Types (classes, enums, structs, typedefs)

• C++ namespaces and Java packages

• Macros

• Source files

This list is by no means exhaustive—there are other, higher-level entities we’ll give meaningful names to: states of a state machine, parts of messaging protocols, database elements, application executables, and so on. But these six are enough to start with.