What to name?

PublishedDecember 31, 2023

I am Jyotiprakash, a deeply driven computer systems engineer, software developer, teacher, and philosopher. With a decade of professional experience, I have contributed to various cutting-edge software products in network security, mobile apps, and healthcare software at renowned companies like Oracle, Yahoo, and Epic. My academic journey has taken me to prestigious institutions such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BITS Pilani in India, where I consistently ranked among the top of my class.

At my core, I am a computer enthusiast with a profound interest in understanding the intricacies of computer programming. My skills are not limited to application programming in Java; I have also delved deeply into computer hardware, learning about various architectures, low-level assembly programming, Linux kernel implementation, and writing device drivers. The contributions of Linus Torvalds, Ken Thompson, and Dennis Ritchie—who revolutionized the computer industry—inspire me. I believe that real contributions to computer science are made by mastering all levels of abstraction and understanding systems inside out.

In addition to my professional pursuits, I am passionate about teaching and sharing knowledge. I have spent two years as a teaching assistant at UW Madison, where I taught complex concepts in operating systems, computer graphics, and data structures to both graduate and undergraduate students. Currently, I am an assistant professor at KIIT, Bhubaneswar, where I continue to teach computer science to undergraduate and graduate students. I am also working on writing a few free books on systems programming, as I believe in freely sharing knowledge to empower others.

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C Programming

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Jyotiprakash's Blog

251 posts

I'm Jyotiprakash, a software dev and professor at KIIT, with expertise in system programming.

In C programming, identifiers are the names given to various entities such as variables, functions, arrays, structures, unions, etc. They are essentially the words a programmer uses to name these entities uniquely. Here are some rules and conventions for naming identifiers in C:

Characters Allowed: An identifier can only have alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9) and underscore (_). No other special characters or spaces are allowed.
Start with Letter or Underscore: An identifier must start with a letter (either uppercase or lowercase) or an underscore. It cannot start with a digit.
Case Sensitive: Identifiers in C are case-sensitive. This means example, Example, and EXAMPLE are considered three different identifiers.
No Keywords: Identifiers cannot be the same as C keywords. For example, int, return, if, etc., cannot be used as identifiers.
No Length Limit: Theoretically, there's no limit on the length of an identifier. However, it's subject to the limit imposed by the compiler, which typically supports identifiers of significant length (usually up to 31 characters are significant).

Examples of Valid Identifiers:

myVariable
count123
_tempValue
MAX_SIZE
helloWorld

Examples of Invalid Identifiers:

123count (cannot start with a digit)
int (keyword cannot be used as an identifier)
my variable (spaces are not allowed)
$sign (special characters other than underscore are not allowed)
return (keyword)

These rules help ensure that identifiers are consistent with the syntax of C and are recognizable by the compiler. It's also a good practice to choose meaningful and descriptive names for identifiers to make the code more readable and maintainable.