Coding conventions

As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one way to write C-like code. First of all, you must select sane whitespace defaults in your editor. Here’s the one true way to configure Emacs.

(setq default-tab-width 8)

(defun one-true-style ()

(c-set-style "bsd")

(setq tab-width 8)

(setq c-basic-offset 4)

(setq indent-tabs-mode t))

(add-hook 'c-mode-hook 'one-true-style)

(add-hook 'objc-mode-hook 'one-true-style)

(add-hook 'c++-mode-hook 'one-true-style)

(add-hook 'php-mode-hook 'one-true-style)

Other rules of thumb, most of which I picked up from Adobe:

1. always use curly braces for if/else/for/while, even if you don’t need them
2. every brace goes on a line by itself
3. the * is adjacent to the variable name, not the typename
4. no extra whitespace inside parens
5. always use one space after comma to separate function args
6. prefer &foo[i] over foo + i
7. prefer foo == NULL over !foo

Here’s a concrete example:

#include <stdio.h>

#include <unistd.h>

#include <errno.h>

int quux(char *foo, size_t len, const char *bar, int flags)

{

int i, j;

char buf[BUFSIZ], *cp;

if (foo == NULL)

{

errno = EFAULT;

return -1;

}

for (i = 0; i < len; i++)

{

for (j = 0; j < BUFSIZ; j++)

{

/* something here */

}

}

return 0;

}

I’ve never been a big fan of Hungarian notation for variable prefixes. I do think prefixes have a place; within a library all function names need to be prefixed with some short (3-6 char) name so it’s easy to see which APIs you’re using. I don’t see the point of decorating my variable names like pchFoo. Maybe because it’s too distracting to be constantly thinking of the Pacific Coast Highway.