Statistics about use of variable and function names in Matlab/toolbox
here I show results of some scripts I ran in order to show ratio of different forms of naming are represented in matlab toolbox. I read some 38,000 .m files and processed the contents. Here are some conclusions
Contents
Capitalized letter vs underscore
Here the main goal was to check names which may be broken to two parts, by underscore (two_words) or by capitalizing the first letter of the second word (twoWords). For this only names 6 chars long or longer were kept. Since many functions in matlab are all lowercase (e.g findpeaks) I also checked that. Then there are numral seperators such as rad2deg. The test only checked that there was one uppercase letter or one underscore etc, not asserting that the name is really made of two halves. Conclusion: all lowercase is more common for long functions than variable names. one uppercase letter is more common than one underscore for both function names and variable names.
What are the typical iterator names in for loops?
i is in matlab has to do with imaginary numbers and may be best not to use as a variable name. However, it is clearly the most common for loop iterator in matlab toolbox.
how to indicate index of some array?
I wanted to see if Matlab programmers use the form iSomething. For this I took all variable names that start with i and have an actual word after. It seems that using iSomething and isomething (no uppercase letter) have about the same frequency.
