In any serious collaborative programming project there are likely to be style guidelines to improve the readability, reusability, maintainability, and reliability of the code produced.

Here is a summary of the style guidelines that we have adopted.

Names are sequences of letters and numerical digits, the first of which must not be a digit.

The underscore character ('_') can be used also but we discourage the use of that character except for class data members.

Class names begin with a capital letter: class Customer

Function names begin with a lowercase letter.

Use CamelCase to form multi-word names by joining the words together and capitalizing the interior word beginnings; e.g., class MetaDataLoader, void getStudentInfo()

Constants are capitalized and created, preferably, as enum values in a class scope. Global constants and macros are usually all CAPS.

Each class name should be a noun or a noun phrase: class LargeFurryMammal for example.

Each function name should be a verb or a verb phrase: processBookOrder() for example.

Each bool variable name should produce a reasonable approximation of a sentence when used in an if() statement: bool isQualified for example.

Modified Hungarian notation for data members:

data members: m_Color, m_Width - prepend lowercase m_

static data members: s_Singleton, s_ObjCount - prepend lowercase s_

For each attribute, we have naming conventions for their corresponding getters/setters.

A consistent naming convention greatly improves the readability and maintainability of a program.