AutoHotkey Community

[urlwolf]

I've reading ahk code lately, and one thing that pops up is the lack of coding standards.

The only thing that I've seen as a common practice is to use 'fake namespaces' by preceeding vars and functions with the name of the file they are in.

Vars and arrays look exactly the same. Maybe one could use some conventions?

Here are some (old) actionscript coding standards that could be used as example.

www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/ whitepapers/actionscript_standards.pdf

I think that'd improve the readability of scripts. For example, one could do @arrays and $vars (a la perl) or foo_arr, foo_var. Same for other constructs. Maybe a poll to decide. Any standard is better than no standard.

What do you think?

[Guest]

[John W]

The idea is good. I use my own "standard": Subroutines are not indented, blocks are indented with two spaces (including the braces), functions do not use the OTB style and the braces and the contents are indented with two spaces, too. And I write some letters in uppercase to separate parts of the name.

[Titan]

[Tuncay]

Thats a good idea to have coding standards. I am also one of the people who like standards. Like the guest (no nick chosen ) above show us why this is not easy to do. Every experienced coder have its own style and may be that for years. Most wouldn´t agree with you, because they don´t see the advantage having a standard and may not care.

We could make documents like the W3C, just recommendations how to write something. May be there could be more than one standard to choose for. We should´t someone drive into what s/he don´t like, but we could tell him why he should do it that way.

For example, I am completly disagree with the style of that Guest above us.

My style:

• using AND and OR over && and ||, because it does not look so cryptic
  
• with spaces around every operator and variable in expression, because without spaces it looks like one word only and not like an expression with different elements
  
• nearly always 4 spaces, sometimes 2 or 3, but never tabs
  
• always indenting subroutines, functions, ifs and all other sort of blocks
  
• no OTB style, always like this

  Code:

  function(_p1) {     return 0 }

  
  
• only one return per function, but exceptions are possible
  
• (since some weeks) a preceding underscore character "_" on parameters
  
• case of function-, command-, variable-names etc matching like in documentation, for example: MsgBox over msgbox.
  
• avoiding globals in functions
  

to tell just some of them.

[corrupt]

As an IT tech I spoke to recently said "The problem with Standards is that there are so many to choose from..."