Consistent programming style is generally considered beneficial for code readability and maintainability, particularly in collaborative environments.
Adhering to standardized coding guidelines ensures that teams follow a uniform approach, making the codebase easier to manage and scale.
Many organizations and open-source projects adopt specific coding standards to facilitate collaboration and reduce cognitive load.
Style guidelines can be formalized in documents known as coding conventions, which dictate specific formatting and naming rules.
These tools reduce the manual effort required to maintain style consistency, allowing programmers to focus on logic and functionality.
Example: Lua does not use the traditional curly braces or parentheses; rather, the expression in a conditional statement must be followed by then, and the block must be closed with end.
Such reformatting by hand is tedious and error prone, but some text editors and integrated development environments (IDEs) have features to do it automatically.
Here an example using LaTeX markup: And an example using plain text: Some programmers consider it valuable to align similar elements vertically (as tabular, in columns), citing that it can make typo-generated bugs more obvious.
As an example, simple refactoring operations to rename "$replacement" to "$r" and "$anothervalue" to "$a" results in: With unaligned formatting, these changes do not have such a dramatic, inconsistent or undesirable effect: A free-format language ignores whitespace characters: spaces, tabs and new lines so the programmer is free to style the code in different ways without affecting the meaning of the code.