Style
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Developing a good programming style will reduce mistakes, make debugging
easier, and make code easier to maintain. Please embrace these suggestions so we
are standardized as a community of ESPL programmers.
Capitalization
ESPL is not case-sensitive. Uppercase and lowercase is used for clarity.
Do not capitalize ESPL statements such as procedure, function, var, begin,
end, for, if, then, writeln, boolean, and string. Capitalize
variable, procedure and function names for clarity:
procedure thisprocedurenameishardtoread;
procedure ThisProcedureNameIsEasierToRead;
Naming Conventions
Variables should begin with a lower case letter that indicates their type:
b - boolean
i - integer
r - real
s - string
t - TDateTime
w - word
Global variables should be descriptive words, capitalized for clarity. Add the
letter g at the beginning to indicate that the variable is global.
Examples:
grInterestRate {The g indicates this
variable is global. The r indicates it is a real}
sFileName {Since g is absent, assume the variable
is local. The s indicates it is a string}
Single letter variables should be local. The first choice for a
local single letter boolean variable would be the letter b. The first
choice for a local single letter string variable would be the letter s.
Frequently single letter integer variables are used in for
loops. The first choice for a local single letter integer variable would
be the letter i, with j and k being the next two
preferred choices. Example:
for i := iStartValue to iEndValue do DoSomething;
Indentation
Tab indent all statements that belong to a block of code or var
section. The end; statement for a block of code should be aligned
with the statement that starts the block. Tab indent compound statements
as illustrated. Example:
procedure SomeProcedureName;
var
{indent all variable declarations}
begin
{indent all statements here}
for i := iStartValue to iEndValue do begin
{multiple statements are indented here}
end;
if i = 7 then begin
{multiple statements are indented here}
end
else begin
{multiple statements are indented here}
end;
end;
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