13.5 Coding conventions
When you try to read the source it might be helpful to know about a few conventions I try to follow. This concerns mostly the names and spelling of variables. And while I try to be consistent unfortunately I don't always follow my own rules all of the time and thus later have to try to to correct these mistakes. I can't promise that I am always successful in this endeavor.
Local variables with function scope should always have all lower case,
i.e. num_points
. For local variables with file scope (i.e.
variables that are global to a whole C file but not further) I tend
to use an upper case for the very first character of the name and all others
in lower case, i.e. Child_return_status
. Truely global variables
(there are more than I am happy with but it's basically impossible to throw
out all of them) mostly consist of more than a single word, where I use an
underscore character between the words, and have each of the words start
with an upper case letter, i.e. Function_Names
. Sometimes that
rule gets a bit loosened up when one of the words is an acronym, where I
then use all upper case characters for the word.
When I use typedef
'ed types I use a similar convention as for global
variables but append the suffix _T
to the end of the name to make them
stick out, like in GUI_Stuff_T
. For #define
'd constants I try
to use all upper case, e.g. NUM_CHANNEL_NAMES
- the same holds for
enumerated values.
With a few exceptions function names are always in all lower case.
Of course, these conventions only hold for my own variables etc. When
I use symbols from libraries I have to use what I get, so e.g.
XPoint
is some typedef
'ed type from X, even though it
looks a bit like a global variable. But I didn't want to go as far as
redefining everything else because it would make things unreasonably
difficult to read for people with experience with the other libraries.
This document was generated by Jens Thoms Toerring on September 6, 2017 using texi2html 1.82.