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Acceptable Abbreviations and Acronyms

In general, you shouldn’t abbreviate names when you design your programmatic interface (see General Principles). However, the abbreviations listed below are either well established or have been used in the past, and so you may continue to use them. There are a couple of additional things to note about abbreviations:

Abbreviations that duplicate forms long used in the standard C library—for example, “alloc” and “getc”—are permitted.
You may use abbreviations more freely in argument names (for example, “imageRep”, “col” (for “column”), “obj”, and “otherWin”).

Abbreviation	Meaning and comments
alloc	Allocate.
alt	Alternate.
app	Application. For example, NSApp the global application object. However, “application” is spelled out in delegate methods, notifications, and so on.
calc	Calculate.
dealloc	Deallocate.
func	Function.
horiz	Horizontal.
info	Information.
init	Initialize (for methods that initialize new objects).
int	Integer (in the context of a C `int`—for an `NSInteger` value, use `integer`).
max	Maximum.
min	Minimum.
msg	Message.
nib	Interface Builder archive.
pboard	Pasteboard (but only in constants).
rect	Rectangle.
Rep	Representation (used in class name such as `NSBitmapImageRep`).
temp	Temporary.
vert	Vertical.

You may use abbreviations and acronyms that are common in the computer industry in place of the words they represent. Here are some of the better-known acronyms:

ASCII
PDF
XML
HTML
URL
RTF
HTTP
TIFF
JPG
PNG
GIF
LZW
ROM
RGB
CMYK
MIDI
FTP

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