C Header Style Guide

C Header Style Guide

 

This guide is not a C tutorial or a step by step guide for converting headers. This is a style guide which represents the ideal header we would like to maintain. Currently not all of the headers under our control conform to this guide 100%, but work is in progress to do this and all new contributions should attempt to use these standards.

• Translations should be very close to the original, so they look familiar and can be updated easily.
  
• Identifiers (including any #defines) should not be changed unless absolutely necessary.
  
• Smaller files may be combined into one bigger header, if they would be #included anyways and all belong to the same library.
  
• Original license should be retained.
  
  

• Headers need to work with the latest FreeBASIC version.
  
• Naming conflicts between multiple identifiers (due to FreeBASIC's case insensitivity) or an identifier and a FreeBASIC keyword should be resolved by appending an underscore to one identifier.
  
• extern "c" blocks should be used instead of cdecl alias "..." for function declarations or function pointer types.
  
• Preprocessor directives (including #defines) should be preserved. Exception: Remove if they serve only to select options for different C compilers, i.e. extern differences, then these can be removed unless they provide support for further code. When choosing compilers the choice should favor GNU C.
  
• FreeBASIC keywords should be lower-case.
  
  

• Inline functions should be converted to a macro if appropriate.
  
• Preprocessor directives inside structure declarations, function bodies, or similar may need to be moved outside because in FreeBASIC they'd be scoped.
  
• Declarations spread across multiple lines with preprocessor directives in between them (for example function declarations, or array initializers) will need to be manually rewritten