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/* $Id: RFC8_DEVGUIDE.dox,v 1.3 2006/12/30 15:51:10 fwarmerdam Exp $ */
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/*!
\page rfc8_devguide RFC 8: Developer Guidelines

Author: Frank Warmerdam<br>
Contact: warmerdam@pobox.com<br>
Status: draft<br>

\section rfc8_purpose Purpose

This document is intended to document developer practices for the GDAL/OGR 
project.  It will be an evolving document.  

\section rfc8_port Portability

GDAL strives to be widely portable to 32bit and 64bit computing environments.
It accomplishes this in a number of ways - avoid compiler specific directives, 
avoiding new, but perhaps not widely available aspects of C++, and most 
importantly by abstracting platform specific operations in CPL functions 
in the gdal/port directory.  

Generally speaking, where available CPL functions should be used in preference
to operating system functions for operations like memory allocation, 
path parsing, filesystem io, multithreading functions, and ODBC access. 

\section rfc8_var Variable Naming

Much of the existing GDAL and OGR code uses an adapted Hungarian naming
convention.  Use of this convention is not manditory, but when maintaining
code using this convention it is desirable to continue adhering to it with
changes.  Most importantly, please avoiding using it improperly as that can
be very confusing. 

In Hungarian prefixing the prefix tells something about about the type, and
potentially semantics of a variable.  The following are some prefixes used
in GDAL/OGR. 

<ul>
<li> <b>p</b>: pointer
<li> <b>a</b>: array 
<li> <b>sz</b>: zero terminated string (eg."   char szName[100];")
<li> <b>psz</b>: pointer to a zero terminated string. (eg. "char *pszName;")
<li> <b>n</b>: integer number (size unspecified)
<li> <b>i</b>: integer number used as a zero based array or loop index.
<li> <b>f</b>: floating point value (single precision)
<li> <b>df</b>: floating point value (double precision)
<li> <b>o</b>: c++ object
<li> <b>os</b>: CPLString
<li> <b>h</b>: an opaque handle (such as GDALDatasetH). 
</ul>

Prefix can be stacked.  The following are some examples of meaningful 
variables.

<ul>
<li> <b>char **papszTokens</b>: Pointer to an array of strings.
<li> <b>int *panBands</b>: Pointer to an array of numbers. 
<li> <b>double *padfScanline</b>: Pointer to an array of doubles. 
<li> <b>double *pdfMeanRet</b>: Pointer to a single double. 
<li> <b>GDALRasterBand *poBand</b>: Pointer to a single object.
</ul>

It may also be noted that the standard convention for variable names
is to capitalize each word in a variable name.

\section rfc8_headers Headers, and Comment Blocks

\section rfc8_misc Misc. Notes

<ul>
<li> Use lower case filenames.
<li> Use .cpp extension for C++ files (not .cc). 
<li> Avoid spaces or other special characters in file or directory names.
<li> Use 4 character indentation levels. 
<li> Use spaces instead of hard tab characters in source code.
<li> Try to keep lines to 79 characters or less.
</ul>

*/
