Re: Review: Boost Coding Guidelines

From: Kevlin Henney (kevlin_at_[hidden])
Date: 2001-07-17 04:47:30

>   From: "Greg Colvin" <gcolvin_at_[hidden]>
>In my experience with corporate standards it has been helpful
>to distinguish "standards" and "guidelines".  Where standards
>are to be followed in almost all cases, but guidelines are
>suggestions open to the discretion of the engineer.  At Oracle
>we enforce the "standards" with a customized lint program.

This is a point also made in Les Hatton's excellent book "Safer C", and
is also the model that the original Ellemtel coding guidelines used to
distinguish between "rules" and "recommendations".

It is a common experience that if you merge the two concepts, then
meandering discussion of "recommendations" or "guidelines" will hijack
the discussion of more easily agreed "rules" or "standards" :-}

Kevlin
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