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<TITLE>Re: [PHPwestoz] Good coding practice (article)</TITLE>
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<FONT FACE="Trebuchet MS, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Simon,<BR>
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I personally know that there are many ways to create variable names, structure your code, and so on.<BR>
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What I am more interested in is the key pointers, such as consistency, legibility and usability.<BR>
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What is useful for many programmers, web developers and those learning PHP for the 1st time, is that a set of guidelines can be referred to so that they may then construct their own system, if they do not like one that is proposed, and then stick to it.<BR>
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I’ve gone through a variety of standards, but it depends on what I am doing at any one time.<BR>
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Comments, as you say, where do you say it is too much? I like to try to comment extensively at the start of any function (not looked at the PHPdoc systems yet), then when needed explain a bit of code that looks ‘tricky’. I also comment code blocks to show what happens in them. Personally I always try and put // end for or // end while or similar into the code to show the end of a particularly long loop.<BR>
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With my students I try and get them to do the same even with short loops, if statements and more. In the end when they combine this with consistent indenting it creates a much better understanding of what they are doing.<BR>
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One way of helping this will be a good code beautifier system for XHTML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP especially one that will work with both systems at the same time. Now that would be a nice Open Source project, if it is not one already. Beautifying the code of all four languages at the same time would be simply wonderful.<BR>
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Anyhow, sorry for slow reply, [I may have replied before, but cannot remember]<BR>
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Ady</SPAN></FONT>
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