Coding standards without control?

[Stephan Kuhagen]

Soni Bergraj wrote:

> editormt wrote:
>> A majority of the participating organisations have coding standards...
>> and a majority does not control them ;o) What is the situation at your
>> location? Does this lack of control really hurt?
> 
> """A Foolish Consistency is the Hobgoblin of Little Minds"""
> 
> from: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0008/
> 
> Python makes coding standards obsolete;)

No, it does not. If you have a team of, say, 50 programmers, everyone
following his own mind-to-ascii-mapping, you are very soon in a situation,
where code is completely unmaintainable.

But Python has the advantage, that your coding standards can concentrate on
the important things and skip most of the formatting rules, that are often
part of other languages coding standards.

To the control part: this is where Python comes in for general coding
standards. Many rules of coding standards can be tested automatically and
Python is a good choice for text processing and checking source code
against the rules of a coding standard. I wrote a Python package for a
subset of our coding standards and that is a very useful tool to check some
100k files.

Regards
Stephan