CS 4448 - Fall 1998
Object-Oriented Programming and Design
Talk 9.2
by
Peter Alber

Overview: In today’s world programmers are expect to do more development in less time. This has created a need for code that is easy to understand, and has a small learning curve. Below are a few simple guidelines to increase the usability of your code.

• Have as few classes, methods, and parameters as possible
• Keep methods private if possible
• Group methods into a number of smaller, separate class libraries.

• Minimize the number of classes that need to be subclassed before they can be used.

• It can interrupt the flow of development
• For classes that must be subclasses, minimize the number of methods that need to be overridden.

• Label everything clearly that is intended for internal use
• Clearly identify classes that must be subclassed. (i.e. label advanced, or implementation)

• Understandable naming conventions for classes and methods.
• Use natural-language-syntax in naming. (i.e. "reverse English")
• Name classes with a noun
• Name methods with a verb (i.e. file->print())
• Avoid using abbreviations

• This will reduce learning curve in understanding an entire class library.
• Put classes in header files that make sense.
• Can be beneficial to use class naming prefixes. But be CONSISTENT!!!
• Consistency in "Accessors" (i.e. int getVal() and void setVal(int x) )

• Don’t override an operator to do completely different things on different data types
• Make keywords completely unambiguous and understandable
• An example in C++
• aStream>>doc; // Extracts data from aStream and puts it into doc
• aSteam>>dec; // Special keyword to convert stream into decimal format
• aStream>>decimalMode would have been more understandable

• Use #ifndef, #define, #endif
• Passing and Returning a reference instead of a pointer if possible can avoid certain errors.
• Make completely clear who is responsible for destroying memory in non-garbage collection languages.

• If simple is better, being able to call a function with no parameters is the best method to have.
• Make a default behavior for abstract classes, or throw an error if it hasn’t been created.