The design of T employs a number of conventions. These conventions make the language more regular, predictable, and easy to learn.
Anonymity: objects are not tightly coupled to their names.
Locality: effects may be achieved locally.
Argument order: procedures which extract components from aggregate objects generally take the aggregate object as the first argument, and selection information (if any) as subsequent arguments. Similarly, assignment procedures take the aggregate object or location specification early, and the value to be stored last.
Indexing: where numeric indices are involved, the indices begin with zero and range up to a given limit. Ranges are specified as half-open intervals, inclusive at the low end and exclusive at the high end.
Abbreviations: are avoided in names of T entities. Words are spelled out and separated by hyphens, e.g. DEFINE-OPERATION, STRING-LENGTH. Where abbreviations are used, they are used consistently: e.g. CHAR abbreviates CHARACTER, as in CHAR?, and ELT abbreviates ELEMENT, as in STRING-ELT.