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This article gives an overview of professional ethics as applied to computer programming and software development, in particular the ethical guidelines that developers are expected to follow and apply when writing programming code (also called source code), and when they are part of a programmer-customer or employee-employer relationship.
code which is executed but has no external effect (e.g., does not change the output produced by a program; known as dead code). A NOP instruction might be considered to be redundant code that has been explicitly inserted to pad out the instruction stream or introduce a time delay, for example to create a timing loop by "wasting time".
The rules a compiler applies to the source creates implicit standards. For example, Python code is much more consistently indented than, say Perl, because whitespace (indentation) is actually significant to the interpreter. Python does not use the brace syntax Perl uses to delimit functions. Changes in indentation serve as the delimiters.
All loops must have fixed bounds. This prevents runaway code. Avoid heap memory allocation. Restrict functions to a single printed page. Use a minimum of two runtime assertions per function. Restrict the scope of data to the smallest possible. Check the return value of all non-void functions, or cast to void to indicate the return value is useless.
For example, a precondition—an assertion placed at the beginning of a section of code—determines the set of states under which the programmer expects the code to execute. A postcondition—placed at the end—describes the expected state at the end of execution. For example: x > 0 { x++ } x > 1.
The Reed–Muller code RM(r, m) has message length = = and block length =. One way to define an encoding for this code is based on the evaluation of multilinear polynomials with m variables and total degree at most r.
Many software products have experienced problems with old legacy source code; for example: Legacy code may not have been designed under a defensive programming initiative, and might therefore be of much lower quality than newly designed source code. Legacy code may have been written and tested under conditions which no longer apply.
A snippet of Python code with keywords highlighted in bold yellow font. The syntax of the Python programming language is the set of rules that defines how a Python program will be written and interpreted (by both the runtime system and by human readers). The Python language has many similarities to Perl, C, and Java. However, there are some ...