find-maint: Coding Conventions
4 Coding Conventions
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Coding style documents which set out to establish a uniform look and
feel to source code have worthy goals, for example greater ease of
maintenance and readability. However, I do not believe that in general
coding style guide authors can envisage every situation, and it is
always possible that it might on occasion be necessary to break the
letter of the style guide in order to honour its spirit, or to better
achieve the style guide's goals.
I've certainly seen many style guides outside the free software world
which make bald statements such as "functions shall have exactly one
return statement". The desire to ensure consistency and obviousness of
control flow is laudable, but it is all too common for such bald
requirements to be followed unthinkingly. Certainly I've seen such
coding standards result in unmaintainable code with terrible
infelicities such as functions containing 'if' statements nested nine
levels deep. I suppose such coding standards don't survive in free
software projects because they tend to drive away potential contributors
or tend to generate heated discussions on mailing lists. Equally, a
nine-level-deep function in a free software program would quickly get
refactored, assuming it is obvious what the function is supposed to
do...
Be that as it may, the approach I will take for this document is to
explain some idioms and practices in use in the findutils source code,
and leave it up to the reader's engineering judgement to decide which
considerations apply to the code they are working on, and whether or not
there is sufficient reason to ignore the guidance in current
circumstances.
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