pointTotal

PointTotal is a term used in computing and data modeling to denote the cumulative sum of points, scores, or weights that have been earned or assigned within a system. It is typically stored as a numeric field and represents the running total for a user, item, round, or record. In practice, pointTotal can be an integer or a decimal, depending on whether points are whole numbers or require fractional units.

In programming, pointTotal is often updated as events occur. For example, in a game loop a player's pointTotal may be incremented after a successful action. In data processing, pointTotal may be computed from a collection of point values, such as the sum of scores from multiple judges.

Implementation patterns include maintaining a mutable state variable pointTotal that is incremented, or computing it from a data set using an aggregation operation. Typical operations include addition, subtraction, and handling of negative points. Care must be taken to prevent overflow and to ensure thread safety when multiple processes may update the same value.

Common contexts include competitive games, quizzes, loyalty programs, and analytics dashboards. Variants of pointTotal may be the totalScore, sumPoints, or totalPoints in different schemas, but the concept remains the same: a single value representing the total points accumulated.

See also: score, total, accumulator, sum, aggregation.