ICS 23 / CSE 23 - Style and Documentation Standards


Using a good coding style is important, for many reasons. Professional programmers need not only to be able to read and understand their own code, months or even years after originally writing it, but also to be able to read and understand code written by others, oftentimes in the absence of the original programmer. Programmers who write code in a clear style with adequate documentation benefit not only themselves, but all other member of their team, as well as future members of the team. There is nothing more frustrating as a programmer than inheriting responsibility for someone else's code, only to find that the code is designed poorly, written cryptically, and documented shabbily (or not at all!). Yet much of the code that I've inherited during my career has exhibited one or more of these shortcomings!

The Java code that you write for this course should follow the style and documentation conventions described in the list below.

A good example of many of these coding practices can be found by looking at the various starting points provided for each project. Some of these files do not follow all of the rules above, particularly the rule regarding a comment on every method (since we expect you to write these comments yourself, in most cases), but they are still a useful way to see these rules in action.