Snake case


Snake case refers to the style of writing in which each space is replaced by an underscore character, and the first letter of each word written in lowercase. It is the most common naming convention used in computing as identifiers for variable, function, and file names. One study has found that readers can recognize snake case values more quickly than camel case.

History

The use of underscores as word separators dates back to the late 1960s. It is particularly associated with C, being found in The C Programming Language, and contrasted with pascal case. However, the convention traditionally had no specific name: the Python style guide refers to it simply as "lower_case_with_underscores".
Within Usenet the term snake_case was first seen in the Ruby community in 2004, used by Gavin Kistner, writing:
However, former Intel engineer Jack Dahlgren has stated that he was using the term internally at Intel in 2002. It is possible that the term developed independently in more than one community.
, names for other delimiter-separated naming conventions for multiple-word identifiers have not been standardized, although some terms have increasing levels of usage, such as lisp-case, kebab-case, SCREAMING_SNAKE_CASE, and more.

Examples

A list of programming languages which conventionally use snake case