Coding standards are important to programmers for a
number of reasons:
- 80% of the lifetime cost of a piece of software goes
to maintenance.
- 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.
The only coding standards currently approved for ALMA Computing are
for C, C++, IDL and Python listed in:
here
for C++ and in here
for C and here for Python and here for IDL
Additional industry standards are listed here, for pure reference, and
are not to be considered mandatory.
For Java, additional
coding standards, provided by default by the
JTest tool are being evaluated.