We need to be able to understand programs other people write. We also need to be able to understand the programs we wrote last week. If we write our program neatly, using consistent standards, then reading and writing our programs becomes easier.

Many of the difficulties you face in getting programs to work will be reduced if you stick to the standards. They are a way of making programs easy to understand, of using methods that are known to work and avoiding common errors.

Here are four useful resources on coding standards. One aim of the standards project is to produce a simplified coding standard or standards that will take the best from these and produce a short readable document.

Here is a draft by Chris Stephenson

1. Kernighan and Pike, These two authors were part of the team that invented C and Unix. They know what they are talking about. You should read their book. A summary of the conclusions is here.

2. The GNU project standards. Linux is really a combination of two projects. Linus Torvalds wrote the Linux kernel, but the rest of what we think of Linux is actually the product of the GNU project. This is a big project with hundreds of programmers collaborating, so standards are very important for the project to work The standards document is rather large, and quite a lot of it is concerned with legal and copyright issues, but it is certainly worth a look.

GNU standards are here:
http://www.ie.gnu.org/prep/standards.html

3. Linus Torvalds is the co-ordinator and original author of the Linux kernel. More machines on the internet use Linux than any other operating system. The Linux kernel is a serious and reliable program. Linus' standards are short and to the point. He also suggests that you should print out the GNU standards and burn them! Actually, the GNU and Linus standards are designed for different purposes and have a different motivation. The different curly bracket style they propose are a matter of taste. The important thing is to have a standard and stick to it. (I use GNU curly brackets convention myself, but the other Torvalds standards are more suitable for programming in our environment).

Linus Torvalds' standards are here:
http://www.purists.org/linux/index.html

4. Sun have produced standards for Java programming.

They are here as a PDF file.