Cases

This is a summary of all cases. Note that a cases is a pair of a pattern which describes how indidivual words are cased, and a delimiter which describes how those words are joined.

Here is a summary of common cases used in programming languages, as described by their pattern and delimiter.

pattern	underscore _	hyphen -	no delimiter
lower	snake_case	kebab-case	flatcase
upper	CONSTANT_CASE	COBOL-CASE	UPPERFLATCASE
capital		Train-Case	PascalCase
camel			camelCase

Other Cases

We can also consider space as a delimiter. In the context of programming languages, spaces are almost universally used to distiguish tokens from one another, meaning you couldn’t use a space as part of an identifier.

But outside the context, we might prepare an identifier to printing to an end user or logging to a file. In the formatting sense, considering space as a delimiter is useful. We can give these names as well.

pattern	space
lower	lower case
upper	UPPER CASE
capital	Title Case

We also can consider the sentence pattern. With a space delimiter, this describes how arabic languages case sentences.

pattern	space
sentence	Sentence case

Sentence pattern used with other delimiters might also be seen used. Many computer users might name files following a case that uses sentence pattern with underscores or hypthens as delimiters. These cases do not have a common name.

Non-Cases

If you ignore the formal definition of a case and consider only colloquial use of cases, we get a list of exotic cases that are used in non-programming contexts.

name	example
alternating	aLtErNaTiNg CaSe
random	ranDom CAsE
toggle	tOGGLE cASE
surreal	s u r r e a l c a s e

Furthermore, if we consider the idea of prefixes and suffixes, some programming languages that use symbols to prefix identifiers sometimes consider those identifiers to follow a different case. For example, Python PEP 0008 defines a list of conventions, some of which we would define as cases, along with names for identifiers with underscore prefixes, such as __double_leading_underscore and single_trailing_underscore_.