Re: Coding practices

[David Kastrup]

"address@hidden" <address@hidden> writes:

> Hey all,
>
> After reading over David's most recent e-mails to the list, it is
> clear to me that there is a coding-practice debt in LilyPond.
> Standards of how and when to do certain things are not shared across
> all programmers, and things that seem commonsensical for some do not
> seem so for others.
>
> Rather than letting this continue to be problematic, I'd like to
> establish a sort of GLISS for LilyPond coding style.  We would discuss
> certain conventions in the codebase to see where commonalities lie in
> the codebase and where things could be made to look more similar.

That's the wrong approach for coding guidelines since it assumes that
"commonalities in the code base" suggest a reasonable coding practice.

The vast majority of the LilyPond code base is not coded with
maintainability or transparency to third-party programmers in mind.

If you want an example of reasonable documenting and coding practice,
take tex.web (it is public domain), run it through weave and pdftex and
peruse significant extracts of the resulting PDF.

That's reasonable coding and documentation practice.  The design is
post-sixties, Pascal (of that day) is not a modular language, and there
are too many shortcuts and "smart" programming practices for having a
well-extensible code base.  But the documentation level and style is
pretty much on spot.

-- 
David Kastrup