The first appearance of live parsing and color syntax highlighting in LEXX, a text editor. 1985

1 billion terabytes

Zettaby te

The year the first high-level programming language, FOR TRAN or formula translation, was invented by John Backus of IBM. 1954

MentorNet

Here’s an ACM member benefit worth knowing about: MentorNet.

MentorNet, as the name suggests, provides a mentoring relationship between students and professionals. ACM student members can sign up and be put into contact with a mentor who will offer advice in a number of areas. During the sign-up process, which is relatively painless, you are asked exactly which areas you would like advice on, from career progression to self confidence, to women’s issues. You also get to request certain preferences of your mentor, including his or her location, academic qualifications, and career path.

After signing up, MentorNet displays a number of potential mentor profiles, describing the person and the kind of advice they feel they can offer. Choose a mentor, and assuming she or he accepts, you can start to swap emails immediately. Unsurprisingly, this is the valuable part of the experience!

Being a student can be very isolating, and having a mentor gives you another relationship to depend upon, and one that is not based within your university, a boon for most of us—no worrying about it affecting our marks!

MentorNet also offers a forum and resource centre that pays particular attention to diversity issues. Sign up and give it a go: http://www.acm. org/education/membership/ student/mentornet.

—Daniel Gooch

Five Programming Tips
Start Your Coding Career

During college, your course in- structors might not be teach- ingyouindustry-standardpro- gramming techniques. While ad-hoc coding may be acceptable for an assignment that you’ll never look at again, coding practice throughout industry is typically highly regimented. It’s that way entirely out of necessity. Companies may have legacy (gasp COBOL!) code older than you. This code has likely changed hands dozens of times and needs to be understood by anyone who touches it.

Follow these five tips to keep your code organized and understandable.

Comment often. You should comment each significant block of code you write—even more, if your heuristics may be difficult to follow. Try to keep your comments consistent, concise, and clear. Whether you use double slashes or semi-colons, keep the same formatting throughout.

Format code consistently. Be consistent with formatting. Do you indent with four spaces or with a tab character? Check with a manager or super-

Working on code is
very often a team
effort, so always
think about who else
will have to deciper
it, correct it, or
change it.”

visor to see if there’s a set standard within the company. No matter what method you choose, keep it consistent. Pay attention to other people’s formatting conventions, too, and see if there is anything to be learned by reading between the lines.

Use one naming convention. Stick to one naming convention and use it all the way through. ‘Int1’ does not convey much information and can be easily confused. Use descriptive names to convey what will be contained in the variable. Append a few letters to describe the variable type: ‘Int1’ could become ‘int TotalCost.’ Again, check with a supervisor or colleague to find out of there is a preferred naming convention used in your company or division.

Avoid globals. Avoid globals if possible. No really, they are more hassle than they are worth.

Fail gracefully. Check return values from functions to help spot errors. Report any errors with as much detail as possible. This makes debugging much easier.

Perfection is impossible. However, with proper documentation and consistency, others should be able to read and decipher your code for future work. Remember that working on code is very often a team effort, so you want to always think about who else will have to decipher your code, correct it, or change it.

These five simple and commonsense suggestions are probably the most beneficial ways to improve your code and its associated documentation quickly and get you off on the right foot at a new job or in working with a new team. Happy coding!