Angband coding style

written by Robert Ruehlmann, Ben Harrison, and Gwidon S. Naskrent

Here are some of the "rules":

• Don't use floating point calculations.
• Don't break savefile compatibility (if not absolutely necessary).
• No C++ code. That also means no '//' comments.
• Put system dependent code between #ifdef xyz ... #endif /* xyz */ .
• No "magic numbers". Use #defines. The #defines should be in defines.h rather than the source file, unless they're very local (such as dungeon generation parameters).

• Comments, comments, comments. Multi-line comments should look like:

  /*
   * A multi-line
   * comment.
   */
  

  instead of:

  /* A multi-line
   * comment */
  

• Indentation with tabs. But generally avoid getting lines over 80 characters.
• Put curly braces ('{', '}') on an extra line with the same indentation level as the previous line. Example:

  if (value == 0)
  {
      do_something();
  }
  

• Put empty lines between code-blocks. Example:

  /* Do something */
  do_something();
  
  /* Do something else */
  do_something_else();
  

• Spaces around the mathematical, comparison, and assignment operators ('+', '-', '*', '/', '=', '!=', '==', '>', ...).
• Spaces between C-identifiers like 'if', 'while', 'for', and 'return' and the opening brackets ('if (foo)', 'while (bar)', ...).
• No spaces between function names and brackets and between brackets and function arguments (function(1, 2) instead of function ( 1, 2 )).
• If the precedence of operations is ambiguous then put brackets around them. Also try to insert parentheses whenever necessary for readability, eg. around (foo & RF3_SOME_DEFINE). There is usually no ambiguity and no macro resolution, but this is an aesthetic detail.
• If a function takes no arguments then it should be declared with a void argument list. Example: int foo(void) instead of int foo().
• Function declaration and definition should look the same.
• Don't assume that functions declared without a return type return int. Specify the type explicitly. Example: int foo(void) instead of foo(void).

© 2000 by Robert Rühlmann, rr9@thangorodrim.net