General Code Style Guide

About

This style guide should apply to language-agnostic programming techniques and practices. For language-specific style, see the style guide for that specific language.

Case

For easy of reading, use underscores between words in a variable name. There is one exception to this and that is java. See Case in the Java Code Style Guide for details.

Formatting

• Code executed within if and while blocks should have a their own line.

Good

c while(amount_read > 0) amount_read = some_read_function(these_args);

Bad

c while(amount_read > 0) amount_read = some_read_function(these_args);

Naming

• Variable names with multiple words should be delimited with underscore characters, "_", rather than globing them together.

  • this_is_good is better than thisIsBad (except for Class names)

• Variable names should start with a lower case alphabetical character.

  • this_is_good is better than This_is_bad.

• Names of boolean types should reflect the question to which their values are true, if possible.

  • Example, a boolean to indicate if a vector is empty should be called "is_empty".

• Class names with multiple words should be globed together and should start with a capital letter.

  • Example, ThisIsAClass

Version Numbers

• Format is MAJOR.MINOR.REVISION.

  • For a beta version, REVISION should always be "b". Otherwise, all three parts should be an integer.
  • REVISION should be incremented when things are fixed but a no new features are added.
  • MINOR should be incremented when at least one new feature is added.
  • MAJOR should be incremented when it is no longer compatable with past instances or if it has changed to a point so as not to be recognizable. This should rarely change.

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