Style¶

Coding style refers to some of the literary aspects of writing code. What vocabulary do you use? For example, how do you name functions and variables? What spelling and punctuation conventions do you use? What orthography do you use?

Everyone has their own speaking style, their own prose style, and their own coding style. While diversity is fine, some coding styles are worse than others. Code should be written both to execute and to communicate with a human reader, who may simply be reading it or who may need to modify it. Therefore, coding styles that make it more difficult for others to read or modify are problematic.

For example what does this code do?

int srev(char*x, char*y) { int l;for(l=0;
y[0];
l++)y++;while(l){*x++=*--y;--l;
}*x = NULL
;}

And now, what does this code do?

/** @brief Reverse the characters of @a src into @a dst, returning the length of @a src. */
int strreverse(char *dst, const char *src) {
   assert(dst && src);  /// neither parameter should be NULL
   assert(dst != src);  /// we can’t reverse a string into itself
   int len = strlen(src);
   for (int pos = 0; pos != len; ++pos)
         dst[pos] = src[len - pos - 1];
   dst[len] = 0;
   return len;
}

In the following sections you can find our suggestions for coding style.