Demystifying Common Casings in Programming: What They Are and When to Use Them

Naming things when programming can be challenging, especially for me as I always try to do it as well as possible. For this reason, I thought of collecting the information from multiple references about this in an article for myself and for those who are interested. So, in the following, I will explain the differences between the most widely used types of casings in programming, along with examples of their uses.

But first, let’s answer the question: Why should we use casing in programming?

The answer is relatively simple: In programming, spaces are reserved characters.

For example, you cannot do the following:

first name = "Mohammad"

Besides that, using casing in programming promotes readability, consistency, interoperability, and code portability.

Common Casings Types in Programming:

Camel Case:

Camel case starts with a lowercase letter and the first letter of every new subsequent word has its first letter capitalized and is compounded with the previous word.

Use: It is often used in the declaration of variables and functions name.

Example:

firstName = "Mohammad"
lastName = "Shahnazi"

myFunction()
onCreate()
isNight()

Pascal Case:

Pascal case is similar to camel case, with the only difference being that pascal case requires the first letter of the first word to also be capitalized.

Use: It is often used as a convention in declaring classes in many programming languages.

Example:

MyClass()
MainActivity()
Toast()

Snake Case:

Snake case combines words by replacing each space with an underscore and lowercasing all the words.

Use: Most used in Python to declare functions and variables.

Example:

python_function()

In the all caps version that is used to declare constants, all letters are capitalized and it is called CONSTANT_CASE.

Kebab Case:

Kebab case is like snake case but instead of underscore, the dash is used, it combines words by replacing each space with a dash.

Use: Mostly used in URLs.

Example:

https://appdevtools.com/case-converter

Also, if the first letter of words is capitalized, it is also called Header-Case.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I hope you found this article helpful and that you understand the differences between the casing types in programming and where they are commonly used.

😊 This is my first article on Medium. Thanks for reading!