RE: [OT?] Coding Style

Stephen Satchell
2001-01-22T21:09:41Z

At 11:04 AM 1/22/01 -0500, you wrote:
>WRONG!!!
>
>Not documenting your code is not a sign of good coding, but rather shows
>arrogance, laziness and contempt for "those who would dare tamper with your
>code after you've written it". Document and comment your code thoroughly.
>Do it as you go along. I was also taught to comment nearly every line - as
>part of the coding style used by a large, international company I worked for
>several years ago. It brings the logic of the programmer into focus and
>makes code maintenance a whole lot easier. It also helps one to remember
>the logic of your own code when you revisit it a year or more hence.

Oh, those who refuse to study history are doomed to repeat it.

The COBOL language was created specifically to reduce the amount of
commenting necessary in a program, because the English-like sentence
structure could be read and understood by humans. The FORTRAN language was
created so that math types could "talk" in a language more familiar to
them, letting the computer take care of the details about how to perform
the specified task step-by-step.

One goal of language designers is to REMOVE the need for comments. With a
good fourth-generation or fifth-generation language, the need for comments
diminishes to a detailed description of the data sets and any highly
unusual operations or transforms on the data.

I've even gone so far as to "invent" my own languages, and the parsers to
go with them, to reduce the need to comment by making the code easy for
humans to read. Not only are such systems easier to debug (with good
language design) but are highly maintainable and usually not all that
difficult to extend when necessary.

Remember, the line-by-line commenting requirement was mandatory in
assembler programming, because the nature of assembler made you outline
each step by tiring step. When I worked for Rockwell, I was granted a
partial wavier when I showed them my assembler-language commenting
style: pseudo-code at the top of each block of assembler code. Blindly
applying the rule to second-generation and later languages is just sloppy
management, usually by people who don't understand coding. (And yes, that
includes some professors of computer science I have known.)

Comments do NOT make code maintenance easier. Too many comments obscure
what is really going on. Linus' style actually increases the
maintainability of the code, because if the code doesn't accurately show
how it implements the goal specified in the block comment, the coder hasn't
done his/her job.

Want to improve the maintainability of C code? Consider the following:

1) Keep functional parts small. If the code won't fit in a hundred lines
or so of code, then you haven't factored the problem well
enough. Functional parts != functions. A program with thousands of
well-encapsulated function parts strung together into a single function is
easier to maintain than a "well-factored" program with its parts spread all
over hell. Diagnostic programmers have learned the hard way that factoring
a program can make it difficult to ensure test coverage and even more
difficult to determine if a part of the code is buggy or whether it found a
hardware error that it was looking for. This is why diagnostics tend to be
rather long affairs with very few functions.

In my ANSI C code, you will see the following a lot:

#define DO /*syntactic sugar */

DO {
</* first functional part, with owned variables */
}

DO {
</* next functional part, with its owned variables */
}

and so forth. The "DO" is visual syntactic sugar so that the sub-blocks
have the same appearance as other blocks, such as if, while, and for. An
added bonus to this particular style element is that compilers can more
easily detect problems if you forget to initialize the local variables, or
define variables you end up not using. This has saved me hours of tedious
debugging of my own code. From the maintenance standpoint, it means that
the definition of local variables are near all usages of it, so you don't
have to continuously page up or split-screen to see the definition (and
initialization) of "foobar_at_will".

2) Reduce visual complexity where possible. Instead of using nested
if-then-else statements, consider unrolling the nested
statement. Example: {if (a && c)...; if (b && c)...; instead of {if (c)
{if (a)...; if(b)...;}

This doesn't have to affect performance. For example, you can have rules
such as:

ruleset = (a ? 1 : 0) | (b ? 2 : 0) | (c ? 4 : 0);
if (ruleset == 5) {
...
}
if (ruleset == 6) {
...
}

This particular method can eliminate multiple expensive tests, and can
guarantee that a, b, and c are evaluated exactly once during a cycle. This
can improve performance. Using AND, OR, and XOR can further increase the
power of the technique without a performance hit. (For understandability,
I recommend strongly a considered use of symbolic bitmasks, however.)

3) Make creative use of a run-on if statement to improve error detection
and recording. One of my tricks is to code the following statement in
application programs:

if( (err = "input file can't be opened", in = fopen(filename,
"rb"), in == NULL)
|| (err = "output file can't be opened", out = fopen(oname, "wb"),
out = NULL)
...
)
{
/* report the error that occurred, using the char * variable "err"
to indicate the exact error. */
}

This means that I don't have to explicitly remember to code error routines
for each and every function call, but the error detection coverage is much,
much improved. I used this technique in an IEEE-488 driver to detect
errors in every step of the way, and it took LESS time to do it this way
than to unroll the if statement because of the inherent tracing that the
technique implements.

4) The functional part should be contained in a reasonable number of
lines. Large while and for loops should call functions instead of having
bloated bodies. Large case statements should call functions instead of
running on and on and on.

5) For those statements that take compound statements (if, else, while,
for, do while) the statement should ALWAYS be a compound
statement. Nothing introduces bugs faster than a tired programmer not
realizing that he/she is inserting a statement in the target of one of
these statements and thereby replacing the target with a new one. This one
issue has broken more patches in my experience than any other single item.

The argument that "this introduces a blizzard of unnecessary braces" is
overweighed by the guarantee that the programming coming down the pike
later won't accidentally remove a target line because s/he is too tired or
rushed to recognize that s/he has to ADD BRACES (and in the case of a
severely nested statement where to add braces) in order to turn a
single-line target into a two-line target. (Of course, some of you never
make mistakes like that. Fine.)

6) When you have an "empty" statement as the compound statement, indicate
it unambiguously. I have yet to find a see compiler that doesn't handle
the following construct correctly:

while (wait_for_condition())
{}

(or, more in keeping with Linus' style without adding an extra line, "while
(wait_for_condition()) {}" )

The "{}" signal (familiar to those of you who are adept with xargs)
indicates that nothing is being done, and does it far more readily than a
single semicolon can ever signal. If I could make just one change to the C
language, I would REQUIRE that a non-empty statement or possibly empty
compound statement be the only valid targets for if, else, do while, for,
and while statements.

7) Name space pollution is always a problem, although in these days of
computer with gigabytes of RAM it's less of a problem than it used to
be. I started programming C when my main computer had 256K of RAM and the
symbol table space for linking was limited. I got in the habit of using
structures to minimize the number of symbols I exposed. It also
disambiguates local variables and parameters from file- and program-global
variables. This name-space management ensures that you don't accidentally
redefine in an inner block a variable that you think is a global. In very
large programs, it also avoids name collisions between portions of the project.

Style has little to do with art. Style has to do with minimizing mistakes,
both now and down the road. If you don't like what I do, then don't do
what I do. Do what minimizes mistakes for you.

And, Linus, I'm not recommending you adopt any of these suggestions -- you
have your way and I have mine. If you like any of these, though, feel free
to take them for your own. File off the serial numbers, and enjoy.

Stephen Satchell