Camel case
[5][4][6] For clarity, this article leaves the definition of camel case ambiguous with respect to capitalization, and uses the more specific terms when necessary.
[7] The practice has various names, including: The earliest known occurrence of the term "InterCaps" on Usenet is in an April 1990 post to the group alt.folklore.computers by Avi Rappoport.
[23] Love has since said, "With the advent of programming languages having these sorts of constructs, the humpiness of the style made me call it HumpyCase at first, before I settled on CamelCase.
[25] 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.
However, mid-word capitalization does not conform to German orthography apart from proper names like McDonald; the previous example could be correctly written using parentheses as Student(inn)en, analogous to "congress(wo)men" in English.
Writing word compounds only by the initial letter of each character is also acceptable in some cases, so Beijing can be written as BJ, Qinghuangdao as QHD, and Daxing'anling as DXAL.
In Tibetan proper names like rLobsang, the "r" stands for a prefix glyph in the original script that functions as tone marker rather than a normal letter.
Another example is tsIurku, a Latin transcription of the Chechen term for the capping stone of the characteristic Medieval defensive towers of Chechnya and Ingushetia; the letter "I" (palochka) is not actually capital, denoting a phoneme distinct from the one transcribed as "i".
A more recent example is NaNoWriMo, a contraction of National Novel Writing Month and the designation for both the annual event and the nonprofit organization that runs it.
In German, the names of statutes are abbreviated using embedded capitals, e.g. StGB for Strafgesetzbuch (Criminal Code), PatG for Patentgesetz (Patent Act), BVerfG for Bundesverfassungsgericht (Federal Constitutional Court), or the very common GmbH, for Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (private limited company).
In this context, there can even be three or more camel case capitals, e.g. in TzBfG for Teilzeit- und Befristungsgesetz (Act on Part-Time and Limited Term Occupations).
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.
[28][29] Berzelius' system continues to be used, augmented with three-letter symbols such as "Uue" for unconfirmed or unknown elements and abbreviations for some common substituents (especially in the field of organic chemistry, for instance "Et" for "ethyl-").
Christopher Strachey's paper on GPM (1965),[34] shows a program that includes some medial capital identifiers, including "NextCh" and "WriteSymbol" (This was most likely the influence of the CPL language, of which Strachey was one of the designers of) Multiple-word descriptive identifiers with embedded spaces such as end of file or char table cannot be used in most programming languages because the spaces between the words would be parsed as delimiters between tokens.
Charles Simonyi, who worked at Xerox PARC in the 1970s and later oversaw the creation of Microsoft's Office suite of applications, invented and taught the use of Hungarian Notation, one version of which uses the lowercase letter(s) at the start of a (capitalized) variable name to denote its type.
This machine lacked an underscore key (whose place was taken by a left arrow "←"), and the hyphen and space characters were not permitted in identifiers, leaving camel case as the only viable scheme for readable multiword names.
Mainstream usage was well established by 1990: During the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s, the lowercase prefixes "e" (for "electronic") and "i" (for "Internet",[37] "information", "intelligent", etc.)
Style guidelines often distinguish between upper and lower camel case, typically specifying which variety should be used for specific kinds of entities: variables, record fields, methods, procedures, functions, subroutines, types, etc.
However, this approach is problematic when two acronyms occur together (e.g., "parse DBM XML" would become "parseDBMXML") or when the standard mandates lower camel case but the name begins with an abbreviation (e.g. "SQL server" would become "sQLServer").
Some wiki engines such as TiddlyWiki, Trac and PmWiki make use of it in the default settings, but usually also provide a configuration mechanism or plugin to disable it.
Therefore, users of those systems often resort to camel case (or underscores, hyphens and other "safe" characters) for compound file names like MyJobResume.pdf.
Microblogging and social networking services that limit the number of characters in a message are potential outlets for medial capitals.
Camel case has been criticized as negatively impacting readability due to the removal of spaces and uppercasing of every word.
The study used eye-tracking equipment and found that the difference in speed for its subjects was primarily due to the fact that average duration of fixations for camel-case was significantly higher than that of snake case for 3-part identifiers.
