The benefit of standards

Many factors contribute to the ultimate value of a general purpose applications framework. Two of the more important factors are described here: a standard coding style and component documentation.

Many years ago, the MacApp team adopted a coding standard with several goals.

• The source code must be easy to read and pleasant to the reader's eye.
• The source code must have a consistent appearance and look as though one programmer had written it.
• The programmer must avoid 'tricky' code.
• The code must be well commented.

In the spirit of these goals we have published two standards that contribute to the value of the MacApp framework. The first standard, which we call the MacApp Coding Style, discusses the structure of MacApp source code, certain codification standards relevant to function and variable naming, commentation standards, etc.

The second standard, Embedding the Class & Method Reference, provides internal documentation of the various files, classes, functions, etc. of the framework. However, the more important value of their use is in the future generation of QuickView or HTML versions of the MacApp Class & Method Reference (C&MR). By embedding this documentation using a standard style we will be able to run tools to generate the C&MR in the future.