Coding conventions

 ( Source Code ) 

Code conventions are important to programmers for a number of reasons:

• 40%–80% of the lifetime cost of a piece of software goes to maintenance.Robert L. Glass: Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering; Addison Wesley, 2003.
• Hardly any software is maintained for its whole life by the original author.
• Code conventions improve the readability of the software, allowing engineers to understand new code more quickly and thoroughly.
• If you ship your source code as a product, you need to make sure it is as well packaged and clean as any other product you create.

Even for the original author, consistently coded software eases maintainability. There is no guarantee that an individual will remember the precise rationale for why a particular piece of code was written in a certain way long after the code was originally written. Coding conventions can help. Consistent use of whitespace improves readability and reduces the time it takes to understand the software.

The management of complexity includes the following basic principle: minimize the amount of code written during the project development. This prevents unnecessary work which prevents unnecessary cost, both upfront and downstream. This is simply because if there is less code, it is less work not only to create the application, but also to maintain it.

Complexity is managed both at the design stage (how the project is architectured) and at the development stage (by having simpler code). If the coding is kept basic and simple then the complexity will be minimised. Very often this is keeping the coding as 'physical' as possible - coding in a manner that is very direct and not highly abstract. This produces optimal code that is easy to read and follow. Complexity can also be avoided simply by not using complicated tools for simple jobs.

The more complex the code is the more likely it is to be buggy, the more difficult the bugs are to find and the more likely there are to be hidden bugs.

Agile software development methodologies plan for regular (or even continuous) refactoring making it an integral part of the team software development process.

Consistent coding standards can, in turn, make the measurements more consistent. Special tags within source code comments are often used to process documentation, two notable examples are javadoc and doxygen. The tools specify the use of a set of tags, but their use within a project is determined by convention.

Coding conventions simplify writing new software whose job is to process existing software. Use of static code analysis has grown consistently since the 1950s. Some of the growth of this class of development tools stems from increased maturity and sophistication of the practitioners themselves (and the modern focus on safety and security), but also from the nature of the languages themselves.

set i = 0
while {$i < 10}
{
   puts "$i squared = [expr $i*$i]"
   incr i
}