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Coding_conventions

hugh greene edited this page Jun 20, 2022 · 1 revision

I am not really picky about what your code looks like in terms of indentation. Traditionally, I use two spaces for indentation, I do not use braces unless required, and I place braces on their own unindented lines unless the code in the braces is three lines or fewer, in which case I put the opening brace after the if(), or other statement. Everyone else does the exact opposite of this, so pick your own style and you'll fit right in.

Types

What I am concerned about and have been seeing happen a lot, lately, are function and variable type confusion. I'll be succinct, and use bullet points.

  • Always use the type which requires the fewest casts in your code. If your function needs a double, take double. If your function needs a float, take float. If your function works for either, Robert has created scalar types for you to choose from based on system. For example, graphics floating point types should default to gs_scalar. Look around the code; chances are, the correct scalar type is used somewhere.
  • Never use var or variant. This is the rule. The exception to this rule is, you may use variant when you need to accept either a string or real type, and you may use var if you need tot accept an array of such objects. If you need to accept an array of only reals or only strings, go ahead and use var for now, as ENIGMA does not yet have an array type.

Naming convention

Another point is naming convention. I am not the underscore-case nazi. I don't care what you name your own variables. Our current convention is snake_case for basically everything. This is violated on arbitrary occasion without repercussion. However, we are running a user-friendly API here, and in user space, functions are expected to use a consistent convention.

This convention is, again, snake case, with functions partitioned using C namespaces.

draw_ This is where primarily 2-Dimensional, but also dimensionality-insensitive drawing functions go.
d3d_ This is where functions that specifically concern drawing in 3D go. Some of these functions are renamed versions of functions from draw_, offered for the convenience of users searching for functions.
sound_ This is where functions go which concern sound resources. There are functions to play sounds and stop sounds from playing by resource ID, but the idea is that functions here specifically concern tangible sound resources.
audio_ This is where all other manner of audio functions go, as related to working with channels and playing instances of sounds.
display_ This is where you will find functions concerning the entire desktop's display, which may contain many windows not related to your program.
window_ This is where you will find functions that concern the window, as managed by the window server, desktop environment, and generically, the window manager.
screen_ This is where you will find functions that concern your program's drawing screen; that is, the region inside the window to which your program renders.
instance_ These functions concern object instances in general. Finding instances, iterating instances, creating and destroying instances.
collision_ These functions concern testing for collisions with instances. They work with not only a position for instances, but also a physical shape. They do not, in general, incorporate dynamics.

This is not a comprehensive list, but a general list of namespaces which seem to run together or are otherwise not obvious.

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