Best and Worst Coding Standards?

An anonymous reader writes "If you've been hired by a serious software development house, chances are one of your early familiarization tasks was to read company guidelines on coding standards and practices. You've probably been given some basic guidelines, such as gotos being off limits except in specific circumstances, or that code should be indented with tabs rather than spaces, or vice versa. Perhaps you've had some more exotic or less intuitive practices as well; maybe continue or multiple return statements were off-limits. What standards have you found worked well in practice, increasing code readability and maintainability? Which only looked good on paper?"

Comments

It's easy

[krkhan]

First off, I'd suggest printing out a copy of the /. comments, and NOT read it. Burn them, it's a great symbolic gesture.

Re:developer buy-in

[Minwee]

ask your developers to create the standard together.

Why don't you just give them all giant Q-tips and play the Star Trek fight music every time they meet?

Surely that would be at least as productive as asking them to all agree on coding standards.

Re:braces

[fictionpuss]

True - but at least it keeps thousands of otherwise dangerous PHP developers safely occupied.

Re:Keep it simple!

[4D6963]

Make it "cut and paste" friendly, and as small as possible.

Cut and paste causes code cloning, which is among the most difficult maintenance problems. Code should be designed, when possible, in small chunks (methods, functions, etc.).

Wait.. are you trying to say that copying the same lines of code over and over again must be avoided? So tell me genius, how else would you implement such a function without copying?

int multiply(int a, int b)
{
int x=0;

if (a==1)
{
x+=b;
}

if (a==2)
{
x+=b;
x+=b;
}

if (a==3)
{
x+=b;
x+=b;
x+=b;
}

// Damn lameness filter, wouldn't let me paste my code in the entirety of its 132,356 lines

return x;
}

Re:Keep it simple!

[Haeleth]

Duh, you so need to learn about this little thing called structured programming, which can totally help cut down on code duplication like that crap.

Here's a hint:

int multiply(int a, int b)
{
    int x = 0;
  loop:
    if (!( a --> 0 )) goto done;
    x += b;
    goto loop;
  done:
    return x;
}

See? Much easier to understand than your spaghetti code, and much more maintainable too.

Re:braces

[wkitchen]

YOU FORTH LOVE IF HONK THEN