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The practice of marking all word boundaries in long identifiers (such asThisIsASampleVariable)(including the first letter of the identifier) with uppercase. Constrasts with camelCasing, in which the firstcharacteroftheidentifierisleftin lowercase (thisIsASampleVariable), and with the traditional C style of short all-lower-casenameswith internal word breaks marked by an underscore (sample_var).
Where these terms are used, they usually go with advice to use PascalCasing for public interfaces and camelCasing for private ones. They may have originated at Microsoft, but are in more general use in ECMA standards, among Java programmers, and elsewhere.
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Camel case (sometimes stylized autologically as camelCase or CamelCase, also known as camel caps or more formally as medial capitals) is a writing format practice of writing phrases without spaces or punctuation and with capitalized words. The practice has various name and conventions. The earliest known occurrence of the term InterCaps on Usenet was in April 1990.
The use of medial capitals as a convention in the regular spelling of everyday texts is rare, but is used in some languages as a solution to particular problems which arise when two words or segments are combined. In the scholarly transliteration of languages written in other scripts, medial capitals are used in similar situations. Medial capitals are traditionally used in abbreviations to reflect the capitalization that the words would have when written out in full, for example in the academic titles PhD or BSc.
The first systematic and widespread use of medial capitals for technical purposes was the notation for chemical formulas invented by the Swedish chemist Jacob Berzelius in 1813. Since the early 20th century, medial capitals have occasionally been used for corporate names and product trademarks. In the 1970s and 1980s, medial capitals were adopted as a standard or alternative naming convention for multi-word identifiers in several programming languages. The use of medial caps for compound identifiers is recommended by the coding style guidelines of many organizations or software projects. Camel case has been criticized as negatively impacting readability due to the removal of spaces and uppercasing of every word.