Just the same as when writing in English, Spanish, German, Mandarin, or other human languages, programming languages each have their own style and grammar conventions.
For example, in English, a sentence always begins with a capital letter, and ends with a period.
Here are some common code style conventions to use when authoring Swift code.
Be descriptive, not concise
If you are writing a variable name to describe a person’s height in centimetres, a good name would be heightInCentimetres, rather than something shorter, like hic.
Consider the following ☺️:
Shortforms lead to confusion. We read code many more times than we write code, so it’s important to make code as clear and understandable as possible.
When authoring code, the autocomplete function does most of the typing for us – so longer variable names do not mean it will take you more time to author code.
Capitalization
Variables, Constants, Properties
Swift programmers use the camelCase capitalization pattern for variables, constants, and properties of structures:
In short:
- first word lower case
- all remaining words, first letter capitalized
For example:
let hairColour = "red"
let massInKilograms = "80"Structures
By convention, structure names are capitalized using a different pattern, known as PascalCase.
Specifically, each word in the structure name has it’s first letter capitalized.
As well, structure names are always singular, not plural.
For example:
struct HockeyCard {
// properties of the structure would go here
}