Identifier Naming Conventions and Software Coding Standards: A Case Study in One School of Software

Within software coding standards, identifier naming plays an important role. Identifier naming conventions were divided into four categories in our research - Hungarian, Pascal, Camel and Underscore. Such techniques in compiler theory as regular expression and lexical analysis were used to extract identifiers and to match them with the defined naming conventions in our evaluation system. The consistency of identifier naming was calculated with standard deviation. After testing students' projects in three years and three pedagogical websites in which there were lots of Java files, the evaluating system were proved applicable and some conclusions were made based on the testing results as well.