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.

Raphael Stolt, in working on his component for the Zend Framework (based on the PHP_CodeSniffer PEAR package), pulled together all of the information Zend provides about their coding standards into one place.

Before jumping into the development of a Zend Framework coding standard for the PHP_CodeSniffer Pear package, I spent some time revisiting and compiling the available Zend Framework coding standards into a handy one-paged Pdf document.

You can download the file here or, if you want something a bit more "spread out", check out the coding standards on the Zend Framework website.