Coding conventions

General conventions

All executable files should have a name with lowercase.

Tabs are forbidden everywhere.

Try to set the maximum line length to 80 characters. Long lines can be automatically reformatted in vim by pressing gqj.

Use blank lines between blocks to improve readability.

For existing files, stay faithful to the existing indentation.

Shell scripts

Executables should have no extension. To know if the file is binary, or in what shell scripting language it was written, the file command can be used. In addition, all the shell scripts should be under $QP_ROOT/scripts/.

The exit code of the script should be 0 upon success only.

Bash and Python2 are the only shell scripting language permitted for executables.

Bash

  • Bash scripts should start with #!/bin/bash

  • All error messages should go to standard error, and should be prefixed with the name of the command. For example, in Bash use

    function echo_err() {
   2>& echo $(basename $0)": error"
}

  • The command-line options should be handled with getopt.

  • The script should check that the command-line arguments are consistent.

  • Long options should be preferred to short options.

  • Always quote strings containing variables, command substitutions, spaces or shell meta characters, unless careful unquoted expansion is required.

  • Use "$@" unless you have a specific reason to use $*.

  • Use $(command) instead of backticks, because they can be easily nested.

  • [[ ... ]] is preferred over [, test and /usr/bin/[.

  • Declare function-specific variables with local. Declaration and assignment should be on different lines.

  • Pipelines should be split one per line if they don’t all fit on one line.

  • Put ; do and ; then on the same line as the while, for or if.

Python

Only Python2 is supported. The reason is that some dependencies use Python2, and we do not want yet to add an extra dependency to Python3.

Python scripts should start with #!/usr/bin/env python2 to mention explicitly that Python2 has to be used.

pylint should be used to increase the quality of the source code.

IRPF90

The code can be automatically indented with irp_indent.

Lines sould not be longer than 80 characters.

Mathematical formulas in the BEGIN_DOC…END_DOC sections sould be written in LaTeX format, between $ symbols.

All the providers, subroutines and functions should have a BEGIN_DOC…END_DOC block.

Providers should never be present in the same file as a main program.

String must not use double quotes (“) but single quotes (‘).

After a read statement there should be no comma.

Only standard Fortran is allowed : Intel or GNU extensions are forbidden.

The name of a program should be the same as the name of the file. For example, for the fci program, we have

program fci

and the file is named fci.irp.f.