How-to

Identifier Naming Convention for How To

  • 7 October 2020
  • 3 replies
  • 163 views

Userlevel 5
Badge +7

At AIMMS User Content we made a choice regarding the naming convention to be used and would like to share the considerations we had to derive at our choice. 

  • What do you think?
  • What are the considerations you used for the naming convention you use?

see Identifier naming convention


3 replies

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

Hi Chris,

Nice article on the naming convention! As you know it is very close to the convention we use at CQM. 

One additional thing in our naming convention that I like to share, is that we prefix identifiers that are locally defined differently by adding an 'l’ for local. So, a parameter locally defined within a procedure becomes ‘lp_..’ contrary to 'p_...’ for global. We encourage the usage of local parameters and procedure arguments to get better maintainable code, and a specific naming style helps in that respect.

Regards,
Jacob Jan Paulus

 

Userlevel 3
Badge +4

I'm curious hear more on AIMMS' vision on the broad subject of code style and organisation. Naming convention is just a part of the style.

Within AIMMS the developers have extreme flexibility on how to structure code and workflows, which becomes a pitfall for larger projects when there is no guidance on the style and structure. Flexible use can quickly create chaos.

I know this is a really big question: Can you give guidance / best practices on how to structure code?

Just some of the questions from the top of my head:

  • How to best organisation of sections / declarations?
  • When to use a module vs a library?
  • How to setup use cases and workflows (in combination with WebUI)?
  • When (or should) there be a model, view, controller design pattern? 
  • ...

 

 

Userlevel 5
Badge +2

Hi Chris,

Nice article on the naming convention! As you know it is very close to the convention we use at CQM. 

One additional thing in our naming convention that I like to share, is that we prefix identifiers that are locally defined differently by adding an 'l’ for local. So, a parameter locally defined within a procedure becomes ‘lp_..’ contrary to 'p_...’ for global. We encourage the usage of local parameters and procedure arguments to get better maintainable code, and a specific naming style helps in that respect.

Regards,
Jacob Jan Paulus

 

Great addition, Paulus. We use some prefixes for parameters that are arguments from a procedure/function. E.g. p_”arg”_name.

We also use other prefixes to easily identify if a identifier is related to interface only (p_”gui”_), or if it’s just a pre-calculation for the optimization model (p_”exe”), or if it’s just direct result from the model variables (p_”exs”_), and so on.

 

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