Introduction

Summary

style: 1b. the shadow-producing pin of a sundial.

2c. the custom or plan followed in spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and typographic arrangement and display.

—Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary

The syntax of a programming language tells you what code it is possible to write—what the machine will understand. Style tells you what you ought to write—what the humans reading the code will understand. Code written with a consistent, simple style will be maintainable, robust, and contain fewer bugs. Code written with no regard to style will contain more bugs. It may simply be thrown away and rewritten rather than maintained.

Our two favorite style guides are classics: Strunk and White's The Elements of Style and Kernighan and Plauger's The Elements of Programming Style. These small books work because they are simple—a list of rules, each containing a brief explanation and examples of correct, and sometimes incorrect, use. We followed the same pattern in this book.

This simple treatment—a series of rules—enabled us to keep this book short and easy to understand. The idea is to provide a clear standard to follow, so programmers can spend their time on solving the problems of their customers, instead of worrying about naming conventions and formatting.