Identifiers

Identifiers are the names we give things in our program. These things can be functions or special locations in memory where data is stored. There are certain rules which must be followed for identifiers:

Rules for identifiers

Must begin with a letter, upper or lower case.
May consist of any number of letters or numbers plus the underscore character.
May not be any of the reserved words in the C++ language
May not contain any spaces

Conventions for Identifiers

The following are not rules for identifiers but they are the conventions that practically all programmers follow when creating identifiers.

An identifier should convey some meaning as to its use. For example, all of the following identifiers give a fairly clear indication of what they represent:
     CalculateAverage
     SumOfSquares
     GetNextValue
     interestRate
     loanValue
     numValues
Each word in an identifier should start with a capital letter.
Create easy to read identifiers like this: ThisIsAnEasyToReadIdentifier
Not like this: thisisahardtoreadidentifier
Some programmers use a lower case letter indicating the data type for variable names. (s=string, c=char, i=int, l=long, d=double, f=float). For example:

     iNumValues
     dInterestRate
     cFirstLetter
     bIsLeapYear
You may find other conventions used by programmers in the company where you eventually get a job.