Re: Coding practices

[address@hidden]

On 16 févr. 2013, at 16:06, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 15, 2013 at 10:44 PM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:
>>> 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.
> 
> While tex.web is a beautiful example of literate programming, it was
> 
> a. created by one the worlds' foremost computer scientists.
> b. created for a program whose behavior and code was to be set in stone.
> 
> I think that looking at tex.web will not give anyone practical answers
> on how to structure their lilypond code.
> 

I've heard from friends that Google has codified standards for how code should 
be written.  What are these standards like?  Is this the type of thing that 
could be implemented for LilyPond programming?

Cheers,
MS