Question

Do you think it’s a good practice to differentiate abstract from non-abstract classes by giving their name a prefix or a suffix? What are the most common practices when it comes to that?

Here are a few “formats” I’ve been thinking about:

• Foo_Base
• Foo_Abstract
• Abstract_Foo
• Base_Foo

The use of underscores and letter case is irrelevant.

Edit: It seems like the Zend Framework uses a “Abstract” suffix (source).

Answer 1

Do you think it’s a good practice to differentiate abstract from non-abstract classes by giving their name a prefix or a suffix?

Unless you’re following some convention, I would suggest not to attach this type of meta-data to your class names. Basically it clutters the code with information available elsewhere. To me it resembles hungarian notation which is loathed by many programmers.

Here are a few “formats” I’ve been thinking about…

If I had to choose, I’d go with AbstractFoo.

According to these PHP Coding Standard you should really avoid _:

Class Names

• Use upper case letters as word separators, lower case for the rest of a word
• First character in a name is upper case
• No underbars (‘_’)

Justification

• Of all the different naming strategies many people found this one the best compromise.

Example

class NameOneTwo

class Name