How to code in professional manner? [closed]

Answer 1

Take a read of Code Complete, one of the best books on this type of subject. You won't regret it.

Answer 2

Code should really compile without warnings

warning: return type of ‘main’ is not ‘int’

The use of unspecified argument lists is generally not considered good practice.

Run the code through something like astyle and it will indent it for you, and add braces if that's your style. Note that it's called 'artistic style' not 'professional style' as it's designed to make the code look nice, and activity which rarely adds as much value as it costs if done by paid employees.

Professionals do it for the money. If your job is to make a one-off program which does as little as this does, then there isn't much point adding that much more comments, using more explanatory variable names or manually tidying up the formatting. Documentation, record of design history and intent, clearly defined sub-system boundaries all matter on larger systems, but they are techniques for managing complexity. As a professional, your job is add the most value for the least cost. Quality, maintainability and testibility are values, as well as functionality; which values the organisation you work for weight the most will determine what you focus on.

Answer 3

I think that whenever writing code you should keep in the back of your mind, how easy will it be for another developer to understand what it is doing. Generally I'd advise the following.

• Space the code out into logical chunks
• Give variables meaningful names
• Make sure your methods only have a single purpose that is clear by its name
• Carefully comment the parts of code where the reason for it isn't explicitly obvious

Basically, if it looks like a wall of text and you find it hard undestand what its doing then its going to be a lot worse for the person who didn't write it.

Answer 4

I'd start with placing spaces after your periods.

Answer 5

Brace the foreach statements (etc) to make the scope of the loop obvious:

for(i=0 ; i<n ; i++)
{
    scanf("%d", &a[i]);
}
getch();

(etc).

Perhaps add some summary comments to logical blocks of code; not "add 1 to i", though!

Answer 6

Getting rid of these "printfs" except the last one would certainly make your original program more professional. Other than that, professional developers usually take extra caution on error handling. For example, what if your program is invoked in the following way: a.out < input.lst where the content of "input.lst" is as following: 10 3 4 5