Eiffel Coding Standard

Language consideration

• Do not put a blank line between

• create and creation instructions
• inherit and parent clauses

• Do not use assertion clauses without tag names.

A sample of proper formatting of code:

note
    description: "Descr...."
    date: "$date: $"
 
class A
 
inherit
    B
       rename
           f as g
       end
 
create
    make
 
feature {NONE} -- Initialization
 
    make (a: INTEGER)
            -- Initialize Current with `a'.
        do
        end
 
invariant
    a_positive: a > 0
 
end

Style

• If instructions:

if expr1 then
    ...
elseif expr2 then
    ...
else
    ...
end

If expressions are very long, break them on conjunctions as in:

if
    expr1 or else
    expr2
then
    ...
end

• Loop instructions:

from
    ...
until
    ...
loop
    ...
end

• Inspect instructions:

inspect expr
when val1 then ....
else
    ...
end

or

inspect
    expr
when val1 then
    ...
else
    ...
end

• For punctuation, we always have a space before ( and a space after ), ,, :, or ;:

require
   a_tag: query (a, b, c) or other_query (c, d)
local
   i: INTEGER; j: INTEGER