ALMA Software Engineering

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.

• Coding Standards for C++:
  from Effective C++, by Scott Meyers
  from More Effective C++, by Scott Meyers
  from Ellemtel Telecommunication Systems Laboratories
• Coding Standards for Java: from SUN

For Java, additional coding standards, provided by default by the JTest tool are being evaluated.