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.

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.

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.