Comments on: Coding standards are critical

By: Richard K Miller

Richard K Miller — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with you on tabs and markup case.

The other big questions for a PHP developer:

* UPPERCASE, lowercase, camelCase, or under_scores for function names and variables?

* Does the left brace ({) go on the same line as the if() and while() statements, or on the next line?

By: Muhammad Haris

Muhammad Haris — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

“Function names should always be in camelCase.”

It is not necessary to use camelCase.

According to Drupal:
“Functions and methods should be named using lower caps and words should be separated with an underscore.”

You should include more examples for beginners.

By: Andrew Young

Andrew Young — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m a big fan of Java’s coding conventions personally. They’re actually on the Sun Certified Java Programmer exam.

http://java.sun.com/docs/codeconv/

(Some of the text of your article is from this page, so I assume you already have a link to it.)

By: mikesmullin

mikesmullin — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Thanks Haris! Good point; I have updated the article to reflect it. I appreciate your feedback.
Readers can follow the link to the PEAR Coding Standards to see even more in-depth examples coupled with explanations.

By: Nathan Lane

Nathan Lane — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

In my work using many different languages to program various types of programs from desktop applications to web apps to command line utilities, I have found that following the standards set forth by the individual groups works the best and feels the best to me. For example although Microsoft’s C#.NET and Sun’s Java coding styles are similar, they have several differences, and because I learned to code Java the Java way, doesn’t make it right to code in C# that way. It makes things a little more complex to begin with, but IDEs usually favor one coding style over another for a particular language. Try coding Ruby the C++ way — you will find that fellow Ruby coders will become confused or may taunt you for writing way too much code to do something so simple. Coding becomes inherently a language or dialect which is used to communicate with others. I find it therefore very important to do things the way the language creator did it. Write C# the C# way, Java the Java way, Ruby the Ruby way, and so on.