There are many coding style guides, IMO actually significantly too many … their existence often only justified by the single hypothesis that having everything in the same style is more readable then having one style per file and letting the original author / maintainer decide it, now maybe my memory sucks but i dont remember a single case where the difference in coding style in different parts of a project caused me any difficulty in understanding. It was rather the lack of any indention, exclusive use of single letter variables or simply the complexity of the code, lack of comments, and my stupidity of course which caused difficulty understanding something …
hmm, mphq cvs is still dead :( so lets try to write the ultimate coding style guide and hope mphq works when iam done so i can finally commit a few minor bugfixes
The ultimate coding (style) guide
Rule 1
Every rule must be justifyable and the justification must not apply to a contradicting rule too
yes, iam trying to avoid the “for consistancy” justification which can be applied to litterally anything
Rule 2a
Write consistant code / Changes should be approximately in the same style as the surrounding code
Justifiction: having the coding and indention style change every few lines makes code somewhat harder to read, while a overly strict style restriction will cause some volunteers (or employees) to leave
Rule 2b
Write indented code (code within a block should be at the same indention level, code in parent and child blocks should be at different levels), placement and indention of stuff like {} is not restricted here, just the actual code
Justification: see mplayer.c for what happens without that rule :)
Rule 2c
Avoid constructs which IDEs/editors have difficulty with, common examples are non-ASCII letters, tab / space mixes, differing tab length in different files, dos line endings, …
Justification: obvious
Rule 2d
avoid non english (in identiers and comments)
Justification: not everyone speaks every language, english is understood my most people, of course if every programmer you care about understands hungarian then its a perfect choice too
Rule 3
maximize usefull information at minimum size and complexity (simple code preferred)
so a variable name like szMyCompleteName is normaly worse then simply name as the type is probably obvious, “complete” also adds no new info … of course a function which converts zero terminated strings to length + chars style would benefit from having the type in the names, it all depends upon how and where a variable is used
comments should not say whats already obvious from the code like int i=sqrt(v); //i is the squre root of v but instead provide usefull info like //i is the largest factor v can contain, so we only need to test integers less then i but then in that case maybe renaming i to largest_factor would have provided more info at less size …
justificaion: the idea is to provide the reader with the info she is interrested in, not to duplicate and spread out the important stuff between noise
also less code means fewer places where a bug could be
Note: this rule also forbids code duplication, and other bloatedness
Rule 4
Write efficient code
Note: efficient here means little memory, disk, cpu, …
Justification: well this one should be obvious
Rule 5
Write portable code
Justification: well this one should be obvious too
Rule 6
Write localized / internationalized applications (user vissible stuff in her native language)
Note, maybe error messages should be dealt with differently as the developers need to understand them in bugreports …
Justification: well this one should be obvious too
Rule 7
Write compatible code (dont break compatibility of file formats, your last library release, …)
Justification: well this one should be obvious too
Rule 8
Write secure code (dont write over the end of an array, checking untrusted input carefully, be carefull with malloc(w*h) due to overflows of the *, …)
Justification: well this one should be obvious too
Rule 9
Write modular code / split code into independant parts
Justification: many dependancies makes code very hard to understand and maintain
Rule 10
If some rules contradict, use common sense (which goal is more important in a specific case)