Idea: Collect hints or ideas on questions like: name clashes, functions versus operations, declaration and implementation files, organising large sets of data, ...
(We certainly don't want to develop obligatory coding guidelines
, but it may be sensible to fix some unwritten conventions to reduce clashes between the library and packages and to make the use of GAP easier.)
Such a section may also be useful for editors/referees of packages.
By convention, names of documented global variables are usually concatenations of capitalized words, like e.g. ConjugacyClassesSubgroups. Thus, words are separated by capital letters rather than underscores. Names of only internally used global variables are usually written in capital letters only, and words are separated by underscores, like e.g. SHALLOWCOPY_GF2MAT.
As there is only one global name space, some care has to be taken to avoid name clashes between packages or between packages and the library. A useful rule in this context is the following:
Names standing for general concepts can be introduced in the library as names of wrapper functions like e.g. Group or of operations or attributes. If they are introduced in packages, they should always be used for operations or attributes to allow other packages to install methods as well or to declare an operation of the same name with a different scope.
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