Whose "Two letter acronyms should be upper-cased" convention is?
Hello,
Can you say, whose convention is it?
"Two letter acronyms should be upper-cased. For example, use System.IO instead of System.Io. ..."
I found it in MS Design Rules, but is is not explained why it is done in this way (most of other rules are well-explained).
I need more facts to ask IT leaders to change our company's naming conventions.
Is it standatized thing by some standatization comitee, or just someone sad and others must accept it?
Thanks.
[647 byte] By [
Maxicus] at [2008-2-14]
These are the official MS Design Guidelines for reusable libraries. They were not developed in a vacuum and the decisions certainly weren't made in an arbitrary way. They are the result of significant discussion by hundreds of engineers within Microsoft and at other companies.
The guideline for two-letter acronyms exists due to the likely possibility of a collision between an actual word and the acronym itself. Does 'Ad' refer to advertisement or 'ActiveDirectory' for example? This sort of confusion tends to diminish with acronyms of three letters or more, most are easily distinguished from english words.
Note that in all cases, to provide the greatest clarity possibility in a public API, the guidelines recommend avoiding acroynms altogether wherever possible (except in cases where an acronym is recognized generally in the industry, such as 'Xml').
Michael Fanning
VSTS Development: Code Analysis
