What is your preferred style for naming variables in R? [closed]

Answer 1

As I point out here:

How does the verbosity of identifiers affect the performance of a programmer?

it's worth bearing in mind how understandable your variable names are to your co-workers/users if they are non-native speakers...

For that reason I'd say underscores and periods are better than capitalisation, but as you point out consistency is essential within your script.

Answer 2

I like camelCase when the camel actually provides something meaningful -- like the datatype.

dfProfitLoss, where df = dataframe

or

vdfMergedFiles(), where the function takes in a vector and spits out a dataframe

While I think _ really adds to the readability, there just seems to be too many issues with using .-_ or other characters in names. Especially if you work across several languages.

Answer 3

I did a survey of what naming conventions that are actually used on CRAN that got accepted to the R Journal :) Here is a graph summarizing the results:

Turns out (no surprises perhaps) that lowerCamelCase was most often used for function names and period.separated names most often used for parameters. To use UpperCamelCase, as advocated by Google's R style guide is really rare however, and it is a bit strange that they advocate using that naming convention.

The full paper is here:

http://journal.r-project.org/archive/2012-2/RJournal_2012-2_Baaaath.pdf