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Coding Standards
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Coding Standards

Why Have Code Conventions?

Code conventions 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.
If you ship your source code as a product, you need to make sure it is as well packaged and clean as any other product you create.
The use of these guidelines should result in readable code and should encourage adherence.
The resulting documentation should be easy to maintain.
This document should be a living document in that as we discover better ways to do things, it gets reflected here.

For the conventions to work, every person writing software must conform to the code
conventions. Everyone.

Then and only then should anyone begin to challenge them*.
*Ultimately, everyone is expected to help refine the rules embodied in this document.