C++ Coding Standards: 101 Rules, Guidelines, and Best Practices

Preface

Get into a rut early: Do the same process the same way. Accumulate idioms. Standardize. The only difference(!) between Shakespeare and you was the size of his idiom list—not the size of his vocabulary.

—Alan Perlis [emphasis ours]

The best thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.

—Variously attributed

We want to provide this book as a basis for your team’s coding standards for two principal reasons:

• A coding standard should reflect the community’s best tried-and-true experience: It should contain proven idioms based on experience and solid understanding of the language. In particular, a coding standard should be based firmly on the extensive and rich software development literature, bringing together rules, ...