No, *not*
StUDlY caPS.
Rather, one way that
programmers make
identifiers out of multi-word phrases. To wit: Capitalize the first letter of each word, and stick the whole thing together. Also known by the more boring name of
BiCapitalization.
For example:
XCoordinate
PersonnelRecord
ThisIsAVeryLongIdentiferIndeed
CrazyCaps got their start with early programming languages that accepted
lower case letters in identifiers, but not
underscores. The most well-known of these languages is probably
Pascal (yes, every known extension to Pascal allows underscores. The Honeywell Pascal compiler I learned on didn't).
There are several possible reasons why some programmers still like to use CrazyCaps for identifers:
- Pascal is case-insensitive, and the consequences of getting the capitalization wrong later are far less than in case-sensitive languages (such as C or C++, where you rarely see the things).
- The only company to make any amount of money selling Pascal compilers, Borland, has perpetuated the notion by eschewing underscores in the libraries accompanying its compilers.
- They might think that underscores are icky, especially for very, very long indentifiers.