Naming Conventions

The naming conventions are not required by the compiler. But programs which use the following naming conventions are easier to read by other programmers who want to understand the program.

Variable names

All private variable names of a class start with $

The first letter is lower case and should depend on the type of the variable:

Letter	Type
a	Array
b	Boolean
c	Collection
f	Float
h	Object (Handle)
i	Integer, Long, Short, Byte.
n	An integer storing a number of objects.
s	String

Examples

PRIVATE $iLast AS Integer PRIVATE $sLast AS String PRIVATE $hEditor AS Object PRIVATE $sOldVal AS String PRIVATE $bFreeze AS Boolean PUBLIC SUB Form_Resize() DIM iWidth AS Integer

Form element names

When placing a new form element. Gambas gives it a name like "Label1" "Label2" ...

Before you assign a method to the new element, you rename it to "btnStart" or "lstAddressSelect". The first two or three lower case letters should be given according to this definition:

Letter	Type
btn	Button, use btnOK btnCancel for OK, Cancel
chk	CheckBox
cvw	ColumnView
cmb	ComboBox
dwg	DrawingArea
dlg	FontChooser
edt	GambasEditor
frm	Frame
grd	GridView
spl	HSplit
iv	IconView
lbl	Label
lbl	TextLabel
lst	ListBox
lvw	ListView
pan	Panel
img	PictureBox
opt	RadioButton
svw	ScrollView
spb	SpinBox
tab	TabStrip
tim	Timer
txa	TextArea
txt	TextBox
txv	textview
tbt	ToolButton
trv	TreeView
spl	VSplit

A project which uses this style is the Gambas IDE (under /app/src/gambas3 in the source tree). It contains lots of more prefixes for various controls.