Spelling and Abbreviations

Use correct spelling in your comments, and most importantly in your identifiers. The LFE documentation projects (books and reference materials) use aspell and include make targets for running various spell-checking tasks across the project files. Feel free to borrow from these for your own projects.

Use common and domain-specific abbreviations, and must be consistent with these abbreviations. You may abbreviate lexical variables of limited scope in order to avoid overly-long symbol names.

If you're not sure, consult a dictionary, look up alternative spellings in a dictionary, or ask a local expert.

Here are examples of choosing the correct spelling:

• Use "complimentary" in the sense of a meal or beverage that is not paid for by the recipient, not "complementary".
• Use "existent" and "nonexistent", not "existant". Use "existence", not "existance".
• Use "hierarchy" not "heirarchy".
• Use "precede" not "preceed".
• Use "weird", not "wierd".

Make appropriate exceptions for industry standard nomenclature/jargon, including plain misspellings. For instance:

• Use "referer", not "referrer", in the context of the HTTP protocol.