My understanding in naming a Class with Prefix

Many source codes, especially those which are written in kinds of C languages, almost always named their classes using prefix.

Intuitively, I adopted to use this way of naming, since many GOOD ones were written in this way. My usual way of learning is by imitating.

As I’ve gained more experience, it became obvious to me why it’s critically helpful for programming.

In my case, I care quite a lot how methods and variables are named. Nicely named ones can help understanding the workflow, minimizing any confusion, thus producing reliable lines of codes.

However, one must careful not to use same syntax for the name of class and instance of it, since it’s difficult to distinguish if one is meant for the instance or the class. It gets worse if the class name and the instance name are as common as something like ‘WebViewController.’

Since naming instances of class happens more often than naming a class, it’s better to name the class with less common way. To make it less common, one of the easiest way is to use a prefix, elongating it to be syntactically different. For example, by using prefixed, ‘FXDWebViewController’ for the class name, one can use ‘webViewController’ as a name for an instance.

Though this instance name is quite common, you can use it as often as possible, without causing the programmer to be confused and even preventing compile time or run-time errors, as long as they are separated by scopes.

It gets even better when one has to use Find and Replace function, since syntactically different words are much easier to be found more quickly.

Also, using the prefix, you can leave it as some kind of signature, claiming your authorship and responsibility on the source codes.