CPSC 120 Principles of Computer Science Spring 2010

CPSC 120 Programming Standards

Consider a paper you are writing for some course. It is certainly important that you get the English grammar correct and arrange your ideas in a logical order - without that, your reader will have no idea what you are talking about. It is similar when you write HTML or Processing code - if you don't get the syntax right and the steps arranged in the right order, the computer won't be able to correctly display your page or run your sketch.

But think back to that paper for a minute. Your professor probably also specified some formatting requirements - that the paper be double-spaced or use a certain size font, for example. The spacing and font has nothing to do with the correctness of the paper in terms of the ideas you are expressing, but are important for making the paper easier to read. Similarly, there are established programming standards which dictate things like spacing, indentation, and naming styles in your program in order to improve understandability and readability for humans beyond simply having a correctly-executing program.

You should follow the style of the examples in the textbook and in class. Some rules are summarized below for convenience. You will lose points for lack of readability, even if your code is otherwise correct.


HTML

Put in line breaks so that lines do not extend past 80 characters.

Use indentation to show nested tags. One exception is tags nested within <body> ... </body>.

Processing

Give variables and functions descriptive names of an appropriate length:

Use whitespace to enhance readability:

Use comments to explain things for the human reader:


80 Characters, Word Wrapping, and kate

The editor kate supports "dynamic word wrap", which means it looks like there are no problems with long lines - but kate is only displaying the lines as wrapped rather than actually inserting line breaks to split the lines. This means uglyness and unreadability when someone tries to print your file or open in a different size editor window.

To fix the problem, you should do the following in kate:

Keep an eye on the static word wrap marker line as you type. If you have a line that would extend past the marker, put in a line break as needed to keep all text to the left of the marker.


Valid HTML 4.01!