Elements of Programming Style

These notes provide guidelines for internal program documentation and style. Although they are intended for student programmers, style skills will carry over into professional life after school. In fact, most professional programmers would consider these standards to be less than minimum requirements for commercial-quality software documentation. While geared mainly for a block structured language such as Pascal or C, most of the points discussed are applicable to any programming language. We will not address the ‘‘how’’ of program specification, design, or testing; these topics are the domain of the Computer Science curriculum.