Naming conventions

Typically, you spend 80% of your development time debugging, troubleshooting, and practicing general maintenance, especially on larger projects. Even when you work on small projects, you'll spend a significant amount of time analyzing and fixing code. The readability of your code is important for your benefit and the benefit of your team members. When you follow naming conventions, you increase readability, which increases workflow and enables you to find and fix any errors in your code. All programmers follow a standardized way of writing code; this improves the project in many ways.

Using naming conventions for your variable names can serve the following important functions:

They make your code readable so that you can immediately identify a variable's data type. This can help students, those learning code, or developers unfamiliar with your code.
They are easy to search for and replace when necessary.
They help reduce conflicts with reserved words and language constructs.
They can help you distinguish between variables from different scopes (local variables, class properties, parameters, and so on).

The following sections contain naming guidelines for writing ActionScript code, such as naming files, variables, constants, components, and so on. Formatting ActionScript syntax discusses formatting conventions that are specific to ActionScript, and common in other programming languages. ActionScript coding conventions discusses coding conventions that are specific to writing ActionScript and developing with Flash 8.

NOTE

Flash Player 7 and later loosely follow the ECMAScript (ECMA-262) edition 3 language specification. It is useful to see this specification for information on how the language works. (See www.ecma-international.org/publications/standards/Ecma-262.htm.)

This section includes the following topics:

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