Consistancy in the capitalization of constants (Java Coding Conventions)

[Hubert Stroebitzer]

Hello

I hate to ask this question.

I haven't found an answer in the forum so I will have to ask this detail question.

As far as I understood the java coding conventions they say about constants that it's not an error to captialize or not capitalize them as far you do it consistent. So I decided for my project to capitalize them. And they look like this:

    /**
     * Determines the position in the DB file where the records begin.
     */
    private static final long DATASECTIONPOSITION;

    /**
     * The name of the used CharSet.
     */
    public static final String CHARSET_NAME = "ISO-8859-1";

So far so good. I think I do nothing harmful.

And now this:

    /**
     * The serial version UID.
     */
    private static final long serialVersionUID = 1L;

Hmmmm. I hate it. What do you think about this? Do you think this will cost my points?

Regards don_huberto

[Roel De Nijs]

Hi Hubert,

I think I do nothing harmful.

I would expect DATA_SECTION_POSITION (instead of DATASECTIONPOSITION), because seperate words get seperated with an underscore.

Do you think this will cost my points?

Certainly not! I capitalized my constants too (with underscore to separate the words) and the serial version UID was just cased like yours. And as a little quiz: can you think of any other constants in Java which are not capitalized?

Kind regards,
Roel

[Hubert Stroebitzer]

Hi Roel

Thank you for your quick answer.

DATA_SECTION_POSITION => You are right

And the quiz: Hmmm. No. I reflected on it. But... hmmm... no. Please tell me.

Kind regards

Hubert

[Roel De Nijs]

Have a look at classes Color (each color constant has both a lower case and upper case variant) and Double (NaN constant). These are certainly the most commonly used (and known) ones. If you want to impress other ones with this knowledge, simply have a look at the constant field values