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Jérôme VUARAND kirjoitti 27.12.2006 kello 4.35:

2006/12/26, Jimmie Houchin <jhouchin@cableone.net>:
Language communities often have desired conventions which make things
easier for the community. I did a search of the mailing list archives
and could not find anything regarding desired naming conventions if such
exists.

Are there any such naming conventions or best practices that I as one
learning Lua would benefit from following.

I think everything lower case without underscores seems to be the norm
in small snippets. This is partly because Lua is a weakly typed
language, variables can hold any type be it numbers, strings objects
or functions. And Lua being such a high level language, code is
usually very short and is therefore clear enough without additionnal
formating.

My 2 cents :-)


I agree with Jimmie,

Lua seems to need less conventions than some more format languages.

One thing I've found useful is commenting the types of parameters in a function header, just above the code itself (kind of doxygen-like, but informal, take your pick or don't but here goes:)

-----
-- [str][,err_str]= serialize( val [,dump_mode_bool=false] )
--
-- Prepare 'val' into a string presentation that can be unwrapped using
-- m.deserialize().
--
-- val: number/ boolean/ string/ table (including subtables)/ nil
--      function/ userdata (if 'dump_mode'==true)
--
-- dump_mode:
-- allows this function to be used for "dumping" data structures (for debugging),
--      without intention to read them back via 'm.deserialize()'.
--
-- _lev: INTERNAL PARAMETER (nil for outside calls)
--      +1, +2, ... for recursive table traversal
--
-- _catch: INTERNAL PARAMETER (nil for outside calls)
-- a table having so far handled tables as its keys (avoids traversing cycled tables,
--      or copying shared subtables)
--
-- Note: Metatables of 'val' are ignored (not passed through serialization). -- Table cycles and shared subtables are not allowed (tables must be a tree).
--
function m.serialize( v, dump_mode, _lev, _catch )
	..

The use of '_' prefix is there for parameters not used by the API (but by recursive calls of the function itself).

-asko