Clean Coding - Common Sense
 

Hello everyone. I'm Chris Zakuto, I script a ton in GS2. Whenever I go onto another server, I find the owners begging me to fix something, so I go in to fix it, and oh no! I see messy code, which happens to give me a headache.

I'll explain how to make code easier to read by yourself, and easier to read and edit by others aswell.

Part I -- Spaces
This is one of the simplest things to do, and it's very easy to get used to. Just add spaces! For example, let's say we're setting a variable.
That's okay, works the same, but it much cleaner if you do it like this.
All I did was add a space after the variable name (x), a space after the equals, a space after the screenwidth, a space after the division sign, etc.
Very simple and very easy to do. Try it out in your next script and see how much better it looks.
Another thing I do is put spaces before and after parenthesis "(" and ")". Check these out.
Fix it by adding spaces after the parenthesis and after a comma. (and also after the if)
Much cleaner (would look even better with formatting).

Part II - Separate Lines
No, this actually makes your script look better. It's not just some way to increase line count (which doesn't actually matter at all...)
For each brace "{" and "}" give it it's own line. This looks much better, and is a huge step closer to clean coding. For example
That's much too crowded.
More lines, but that doesn't matter. Much cleaner code, especially in longer scripts.
Another thing I hate is an event that has a single line of code and has no brackets.
Can be corrected easily
Part III - Formatting
Now that you have everything else down, this is probably the most important part, and all it takes is the tab button every once in a while. Take a look at this code.
Eww, ugly. Check this out.
That's the last time you'll ever be caught searching for where you forgot to put that end brace! All it takes is a tab. Whenever you create a new opening brace, immediatly make the closing brace. I always do that, and it always works for me. I never have too many/too few braces in my programs.

Part IV - Naming Functions
This is really just something that makes your code look nicer. I've used several examples of functions here, such as dosomethingelse(), godosomething(), and milkacow(). These are a little ugly, but are incredibly easy to fix.
What you do is take the first word of a function (I'll use the function godosomethingelse()), and then add the rest of the words with their first capitalized. For example, that godosomethingelse() can be split into:
go do something else
now change it to this
go Do Something Else
then put them together and you have
goDoSomethingElse();
Much nicer.

Hope you all enjoyed this guide. Leave comments as you wish, but please don't flame.
Chris Zakuto

Pretty much reinforcing some of what I've written in http://forums.graalonline.com/forums...ad.php?t=61805, there are a few more guidelines that I have previously written there to help keep code clean too.

Nice work, though.

Thanks, if I'd have seen that I wouldn't have posted this ... though you did post that in 2005, so unless you're searching for it you wouldn't find it.

The only problem I have with adding spacing just for personal looks is the fact I hate adding all that width and having to scroll horizontally.

If you maximize the screen there are few times you have to do this ... most things can be split up.

Ya, I do it mainly with arrays, but I hate doing it with if statements.

Real coders just do it however they like it then run their code through a beautifier when they are done ;)

see emacs/vim

Umm what?
Looks way nicer then

But that is a preference thing. I personally think what you say is better looks more obnoxious.

also, you space too much, you can use spacing to help visualize order of operations. and padding the conditional statements is a waste.

also, single line functions are okay as wrappers. Declare them at the top, looks nice.
And i am going to agree with dusty on multilining if statements. if it needs to be that obnoxious, store booleans before the comparision.

Yeah, Hell, it really is based all off preference. For me it's more of a mood thing, sometimes I think padding looks nice, but no padding is more compact and a bit cleaner.

Style like a legend:

No. Ideally you should not be omitting brackets.

I prefer my way.

Lol that's a mix of styles >_<

I follow these two simple things:

* New line for bracket ONLY at new functions
* Spacing in variables (such as: var = pie + (1*4)), and in function paramaters (such as blah(p1, p2, p3))

With functions I always use brackets, with statements I tend to omit them if there is only one command by force of habit, but I do usually indent it still and move it to the next line. If there is an else following the if however I always use brackets. Personally I just find it looks a lot nicer that way. As far as spacing goes I agree with HR.