“But Marc, I am an expert coder! Je suis une artiste of zee bits and zee bytes! Surely my aesthetic choices are excellent!” Perhaps. To help get you in the habit of writing neatly formatted formatted code, we’re going to start using a style checker. No comments! One letter variable names! Inconsistent indenting! What were they thinking?!?! And then realize that it was you that wrote it, only a few weeks ago. Someday, you’ll have the delightful experience of reading a particularly awful method, and get grumpy about which terrible programmer wrote it. This last point cannot be overlooked: most programmers spend most of their time reading code, and often that code was written by someone else. And some just impose aesthetic consistency across files, which is helpful when reading others’ code. Some guidelines improve readability, like requiring spaces around operators inside of conditionals and the like.
Some style guidelines help prevent errors (for example, requiring curly braces, even when they’re optional, like for the body of an if statement). There’s a variety of reasons for this requirement. I’ve mentioned in class and on Piazza that many organizations impose a “style guide” on projects. Starter code: checkstyle-lab.zip ( Do not import into Eclipse until you’ve installed the style checker as described in this lab.) Estimated time to complete: 30–45 minutes
0 kommentar(er)
