Coding standards and line length [closed]

Answer 1

The best practice typically stems from the purposes behind the line-length restriction itself:

• Increase interoperability (between programmers, editing software, etc.)
• To increase readability and comprehension
• To increase enjoyment and development speed
• To increase revenues and profits

Thus, your choices, such as aligning all the stmt parameters, are good if they contribute both to your own future comprehension and that of others on your team.

Hope this helps ;) -M

Answer 2

I'm not aware of any standard, as it would be tough to say. For those of us on larger monitors, we can view more horizontal code than others on smaller monitors. I generally try to build long strings sequentially via .= (PHP) when it's necessary, and as your code demonstrated I split lengthy arrays arbitrarily onto new lines depending on how many characters exist in that particular line.

Answer 3

I don't think one should intentionally have long lines but, at the risk of offending many, I suggest that line length really isn't that important anymore.

Vim and emacs handle long lines pretty well, and they're installed on almost every Unix box. On Windows, you'll almost always be within a GUI text editor. I do think your $Stmt->bind_result style is the easiest to read, but if you just need to load a bunch of mostly static information in one statement, I have no problem with a 1000 character line.

Answer 4

If you're wrapping more than two items, I prefer a new line for each item like in your third example. It's easier for automated source control tools to merge edits from other people if there's only one item per line.

Answer 5

Follow the standard used by the surrounding code. Don't create your own "standard' no matter how much "better".

Answer 6

In prose, lines longer than 80 or so have been shown to be harder to read. (See page 13 of LaTeX Memoir class documentation.) Code Complete (section 18.5, page 425 of my edition) of also references the 80 character limit with this proviso:

With larger screens, narrow typefaces, laser printers, and landscape mode, the arguments for the 80-character limit aren't as compelling as they used to me. A single 90-character-long line is usually more readable than one that has been broken in two just to avoid spilling over the 80the column. With modern technology, it's probably all right to exceed 80 columns occasionally.

I would indent the SQL in your first example separately from the rest of the code:

if ($Stmt = $Mysqli->prepare(
            "SELECT color, pattern, size,
                    manufacturer, mfgSku, storeLocation,
                    aisle, status
             FROM tblItems 
             WHERE ourSku = ?")) {

The second example might be better if it were loaded into a configuration file or table.

The third is fine, but you could tighten it up a bit with:

$Stmt->bind_result( 
   $this->_firstName,
   $this->_lastName,
   $this->_BillToAddress->address1,
   $this->_BillToAddress->address2,
   $this->_BillToAddress->city,
   $this->_BillToAddress->state,
   $this->_BillToAddress->zip,
   $this->_BillToAddress->country,
   $this->_email,
   $this->_status,
   $this->_primaryPhone,
   $this->_mobilePhone 
);