Question

I’ve been quoting this segment from Sun’s document for the past few days, and only now do I stop and think about what it’s saying, and I can’t make any sense of it. Please keep in mind that English is not my first language.

Naming conventions

Variables: Except for variables, all instance, class, and class constants are in mixed case with a lowercase first letter.

How is this making sense? Isn’t this saying that class names are in mixed case with a lower-case first letter? Like I should name it class myClass? And class constants are also in mixed case with a lower-case first letter? Like instead of Integer.MAX_VALUE, it should’ve been named integer.maxValue?

And is it really saying anything about how variables themselves should be named?

Am I not parsing this properly or is this actually a blatant error?

Answer 1

Sun has accepted this as a bug, with low priority:
https://bugs.java.com/bugdatabase/view_bug?bug_id=4311597

describing the convention for naming variables (the penultimate row in the table). It is plainly wrong – class
constants are not in mixed case, as the next row in the table shows. And what is this "except for variables"
business? The text is supposed to be describing variables!!

The text should read:

"All instance and class variables are in mixed…"

thus dropping the words "except for variables" and "class constants"