Igor Pro coding conventions and best practices

The following document defines a set of well-proven coding conventions and guide lines for all levels of Igorians.

• Procedures
• Whitespace and Comments
  • Comments
  • Doxygen
  • Whitespace
• Code
  • General
  • Waves
  • Constants
  • Macros
  • Functions
  • Avoid Memory Leaks
  • Bitwise vs. logical operators
  • Prefer named entities over unnamed ones
  • No code outside the event switch in GUI control procedures
  • Preventing Debugger Popup
  • Runtime Error / Abort Handling Conventions
• General hints
• Anti Patterns
  • if and do/while instead of for loops
  • Inconsistent WAVE/DFREF/NVAR/SVAR usage
  • Treating boolean variables as non-boolean
  • Superfluous comparison for boolean values
  • Unnecessary variables
  • Wave/Datafolder creator functions don’t return the just created objects
  • Unnecessary use of StringMatch
  • Unnecessary loops
  • Unnecessary use of sprintf
  • Unnecessary use of Execute
  • Avoid relying on the top window and prefer structure based GUI control procedures
  • Avoid magic numbers
  • Unused parameters
  • Avoid function calls in loop statements
• Performance tests
  • Dimension labels versus numerical indizes

Links and Literature

• Git settings for Igor Pro code: http://www.igorexchange.com/node/6013

• Robert C. Martin, Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship, Prentice Hall (2008)

• How to write good commit messages: http://who-t.blogspot.de/2009/12/on-commit-messages.html