The MMIX Supplement: Supplement to The Art of Computer Programming Volumes 1, 2, 3 by Donald E. Knuth

STYLE GUIDE

1. NAMES

Choosing good names is one of the most important and most difficult tasks when writing programs, especially if the programs are intended for publication. Good names need to be consistent and so this section starts with some simple rules that guided how names in this book were chosen.

Small named constants, for instance, have all uppercase names such as FACEUP. Special cases of this rule are the offsets of fields inside records such as NEXT or TAG (see 2.1–(1) and 2.1–(5)). Addresses are associated with names that always start with an uppercase letter and continue with uppercase or lowercase letters. Examples are ‘TOP OCTA 1F’ and ‘Main SET i,0’. In contrast, names for registers use only lowercase letters, as in x, t, or ...