"Good ideas can be buried in impenetrable code." Looking at a program and deciding on ways to revise the code can be an interesting and challenging task.

A software engineer knows that a working program needs to be understood by others. The current Y2K problem is an example of how critical this is.

Top Down Design

• Function main ( ) is an outline, consisting of calls to other functions that contain actual code.
• All functions called by main( ) are prototyped above and written below it.
• Each function performs one task, usually less than a screen (20 lines).
• Every variable is either passed to a function as a parameter or declared locally in a function.

Readability

• Upper/lower case is clear and consistent with meaningful identifiers
  beginning with a lowercase letter;
  if more than one word, subsequent words begin with caps; constants all caps. EXAMPLES: distance, totalDistance, getValues( ), MAX
• Bodies of code delimited by curly braces are indented a consistent 3 to 5 columns and white space is used appropriately.

• The comment block at the top of the program contains your name, date written, lab name, teacher, period, and short paragraph describing what the program does.
• Each function, other than main( ), contains pre- and post-conditions