[SystemSafety] A small taste of what we're up against

[paul_e.bennett at topmail.co.uk]

On 25/10/2018 at 5:58 PM, "Derek M Jones" <derek at knosof.co.uk> wrote:
>
>Peter,
>
>> So the other part of the story is having a "easy-to-read" program
>> structure and coding style
>
>"easy-to-read", or readability as it's known in academic work,
>is one of those terms that is easy to get general agreement on,
>but extremely hard to specify.

Whilst "Readability" might seem a hard thing to nail down in a more
formal manner, there are aspects of documentation and coding
style, which if laid out in some form of expectations document, might
help across a project or even several if it became a specified 'House
Style'. This being applied to all the written material including the technical
specification documents and the source code listings themselves.

As one who prefers a more literal style of producing the code (even to
the extent of writing the block-comments first in the source file, I find a
reasonable block-comment description helps the understanding of the
underlying code (and even the notion of whether or not it does as the
block comment describes by inspection). Forcing this on the software
designers and coders seems to help in clarifying the purpose of each
function created.

>Domain knowledge is an important factor.  Knowing what the code
>is trying to do is a big help in following it.

The above literal style even helps those not versed in coding to see
what the intent is and for small fragments of code, would probably be
able to follow well enough in a guided review.

>Language fluency is also a big help.  Recognizing the idioms
>used by writers of a particular language removes the need to
>have to think much about chunks of the code.

>From a comment I have seen in another mailing list (dealing with PLC's)
"Why not write it so that your grandmother would understand?" That
surely would be quite a test of clarity.

Regards

Paul E. Bennett IEng MIET
Systems Engineer
Lunar Mission One Ambassador
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