Paul Jones' Blog: Line Length, Volume, and Density

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 09:33:00 -0500

In a new blog post, Paul Jones looks at three aspects of coding style - line length, volume and density - and how different people have different assumptions as to what's "right".

When it comes to coding style, there are are various ideas about how you should write the individual lines of code. The usual argument is about "how long should a line of code be"? There's more to it than that, though. Developers should also take into account line volume ("number of lines") and line density ("instructions per line").

He mentions the PEAR style guide when talking about line length, reading code like and sentence in line volume/density and how the "shorter is better" concept can be pushed to its extreme limits taking code into the unreadable zone.

Zend Developer Zone: Code is Beautiful

Tue, 18 Apr 2006 13:13:57 -0500

In this post from the Zend Developer Network, there's some talk about a web service that can be useful to any PHP developer out there - new to the language or not. Bad coding practices can lead to hard to read code, the worst of them is not formating your code correctly. Thankfully, there's PHPFormatter to help out.

Using this service, you can upload your code, beautiful or crappy and it will format it for you. If you don't bother to register, you can choose from several of the standard formats like PEAR, BSD or GNU style formatting. If you register with the site (free) you can define your own style.

Cal also includes some of the reasons the PHPFormatter crew give for making code beautiful, including bringing a project's code up to your current style or fixing a downloaded, unreadable script. You can also use it to format your code to fit with the PEAR style.

PHPDeveloper.org

Paul Jones' Blog: Line Length, Volume, and Density

Zend Developer Zone: Code is Beautiful