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Naming rules and conventions

命名規則與慣例

When assigning names to objects, programmers adhere to a set of rules and conventions which help to standardize code and make it more accessible to everyone. Here are some naming rules and conventions that you should know:

  • Names cannot contain spaces.

  • Names may be a mixture of upper and lower case characters.

  • Names can’t start with a number but may contain numbers after the first character.

  • Variable names and function names should be written in snake_case, which means that all letters are lowercase and words are separated using an underscore. 

  • Descriptive names are better than cryptic abbreviations because they help other programmers (and you) read and interpret your code. For example, student_name is better than sn. It may feel excessive when you write it, but when you return to your code you’ll find it much easier to understand.

Annotating variables by type

This has several benefits: It reduces the chance of common mistakes, helps in documenting your code for others to reuse, and allows integrated development software (IDEs) and other tools to give you better feedback.

How to annotate a variable:

a = 3                  #a is an integer
captain = "Picard"     # type: str
captain: str = “Picard”

Data type conversions

Implicit vs explicit conversion 隱式 vs 顯式轉換

Implicit conversion is where the interpreter helps us out and automatically converts one data type into another, without having to explicitly tell it to do so.

Example:

# Converting integer into a float
print(7+8.5)

Explicit conversion is where we manually convert from one data type to another by calling the relevant function for the data type we want to convert to.

We used this in our video example when we wanted to print a number alongside some text. Before we could do that, we needed to call the str() function to convert the number into a string.

Example:

# Convert a number into a string
base = 6
height = 3
area = (base*height)/2
print("The area of the triangle is: " + str(area)) 

 

Resources

Naming rules and conventions

Annotating variables by type