CBOLD Reference: Style Guide

Coolquest, Inc.

C⁺⁺BOLD Reference Manual

16. Style Guide

Following the guidelines in this section will enhance readability and understandability of CBOLD designs. Some guidelines are designed to improve design navigability in some IDE's.

For more on programming and design style, see the Recommended Reading.

In general, all names assigned by the user must be valid C++ names. I.e., they must consist of the characters A-Z, a-z, 0-9, and _ (underscore), and they must not begin with a digit (0-9).

One exception to this rule is net names, which, for example, might contain characters such as "*" (asterisk) or "/" (forward slash). Even with net names, however, the designer should avoid using special characters if possible, because some CAD programs may not tolerate them. See Naming Conventions for Nets.

Names containing a double underscore are reserved for the implementation (i.e., for the compiler), so they are to be avoided.

Section Contents

16.1.	Naming Conventions for User Classes
16.2.	Naming Conventions for Ports
	16.2.1. No-connect Pins
	16.2.2. Bus Ports
	16.2.3. Differential Pairs
16.3.	Naming Conventions for User Instances
	16.3.1. Naming Conventions for Terminators
16.4.	Naming Conventions for Nets
	16.4.1. Active-Low Signals and Differential Pairs
	16.4.2. Automatically Assigned Net Names
16.5.	Reference Designator Prefix Conventions
16.6.	General Style Guidelines