Programming Style

Programming style refers to the characteristics your program has as a text document that can be read by humans.

Your overall goal is to produce a program that is reads well and conveys to another programmer your structure, strategies, and algorithms clearly.

What constitutes good style?

Here are a few things to do:

• Make sure the code is nicely indented to give good visual definition to the various blocks of code (loop bodies, if-then-else blocks, etc.).
• Declare your variables at the top, and give // comments stating their use.
• Create named constants (variables with initial values that you never change) rather than burying numbers in your code for things like loop limits, conversion factors, etc.
• Put a large comment (a block comment) at the top of the script explaining its general purpose. For this class, also make sure the first items in that block comment are your name, your ONYEN, and the class identification (COMP 110).
• Comments should appear before major loops and code divisions telling what activities are being done or what quantity is being computed.
• Variable names should be well chosen so they are informative... for example "averageDistance" is informative... "ad" or "x" is not. Loops indices can be single character variables.