Programming Style

Last modified Monday, 06-Feb-2023 19:55:32 UTC.

It's important to program in style, so that ...
- You can easily read and understand your code
- Others can easily read and understand your code
- You code can be easily maintained
- You code can be easily modified
Programming Tools
- Computer Scientists need to know what's going on "under the hood".
- Clicking buttons hides too much - learn to use a terminal interface.
- Clicking buttons hides too much - IDEs come after "edit, compile, execute, debug".
- Editing
  - You may not use pico (or anything like that)
  - You may use gedit
  - You should use vi or emacs
Identifiers
- Start with a letter, and contain letters and digits. Letters are case sensitive. Some people use underscores, but that takes up space unnecessarily.
- Must be meaningful in English (Geoff's law).
- Local variables must be declared at the start of a method (Geoff's law) - not within loop headers, not within compound statements.
Indentation and Lines
- Indent blocks 2-4 characters consistently (Java law)
- Use space (NOT tabs) for indenting (portability law)
- No line longer than 80 or 100 (choose one) characters (Geoff's law)
- Continuations against the left margin (Geoff's suggestion)
- Use a consistent style.

Comments

Code must be documented using comments.
On a single line starting with //, e.g.,
```
//----The SNAFU algorithm is used here 
```

In /* */ pairs, e.g.,

/*
   Program DisplayMessage

   The program displays the text "I Love C more than Java". The program uses a
   MessageBox object from the javabook package to display the text.
   
*/

and

/* The SNAFU algorithm is used here */