What is good style?

What is good style?

[Georg Bauhaus]

Robert Dewar (robert_dewar@my-deja.com) wrote:

: Conformity to both formal and informal standards in programming
: is an important part of good style.

May I add some points?

Conformity to both formal and informal standards in general
may or may not be an important part of good style, I think:
If you code a finite-state machine, the degree of standard
(in)formality used may depend on your estimation of the
readers' knowledge and your didactical habits: if your code
is written to serve as an example, a nonstandard form, both
formal and informal, of presentation may be successful. If it
is written for people who know finit-state machines, I guess
it will be advisable to use wellknown, standard formal terms.

(To give an example, if you tell an audience, who hate
mathematics, that the infinitely many never ending stories
could never be written even if infinitely many monks had
infinitely much time to write them down, they will more likely
follow your arguments involving Cantor's method than if you
talked about real numbers in standard formal or informal
mathematical idioms.)

It may even be helpful to play or fool around, even while trying
to be productive in a commercial environment; I remember somone
reporting how the most silent exhaust pipe had been found using
an alledgedly nonstandard engineering technique: manipulating
the pipe in a way that is usually considered the opposite of
good engineering (AFAIK), i.e. just trying out, play and hear,
do foolish and propably resource consuming things like giving
the pipe a very nonstandard form on the grounds of no theory ...

So what is good style? I'm not yet sure what constitutes the
criteria for the attribute "good".

However, reading nonconforming (and conforming, see below)
sources might involve a bit more *work* in the beginning,
because the reader cannot be expected to be *used to* that
particular style. E.g., Ada has a particular style of saying
"send a messages to this object" (that was recently discussed
in another thread) and I think some people strongly dislike
this style, because the style does not belong to the set of
styles they are used to.

Georg Bauhaus