Coding Style Guide

There are some rules that must be followed by developers of Tocc, in order to keep a cleaner and more maintainable code.

And remember: Special cases are not special enough to break the rules.

Appearance

  • Indents are two spaces.

  • Braces should be open in the next line. Example:

    if (name == "test")
{
  // Do some stuff.
}

  • Never write a if, for, etc without braces:

    // Illegal! Don't write like this.
if (title.size() == 0)
  title = "default"

  • Put spaces around operators, assignments, commas, etc:

    int x = 24;
int y = 7;
Point point(x, y * 2);

  • There shouldn’t be any trailing space in the source file. You can use git diff --check before any commit to check that.

Naming

  • Never use abbreviation. Always use clear and meaningful name for variables, functions, classes, and everything else.

  • Name of classes must be in Camel Case. Like InvalidArgumentsError.

  • Name of constants must be all in captal letters, and each word separated by underscore. Example: MAXIMUM_ALLOWED_TAGS = 100.

  • Everything else (methods, variables, name spaces, file names, etc) must be all in lower case. Examples: tags_list, get_absolute_path.

Unit Tests

  • Developers must write a Unit Test for every functionality they add.

Commit Messages

  • Include related issue number (if any) in the commit message. In the form issue #52.

Headers

  • First header that includes in a .cpp file, should be its header. For example, in expr.cpp, the first include must be expr.h. Then other headers. It will help us see dependency problems earlier.