Best practices

As we have now looked at the basics of some of the key components of a program, there is another important aspect of how to write a good program that we will consider.

From a machine's perspective, there is no understanding of how a program is written, as long as the instructions given in the program are in the right format or syntax and the machine is able to interpret each of the instructions correctly. For an end user, again the way the program is written might not be important as long as the end user gets the desired result. The person concerned with how a program is written is a programmer who is writing their own program, or a programmer or developer who needs to interpret another programmer's program.

There may be multiple reasons why a programmer might need to interpret a program that's not been written by them. It may be to support the program while the programmer who wrote the program is not available, or to enhance the program by adding their own piece of code or programming instructions. Another reason for code readability is fixing bugs. Any program or set of instructions may malfunction due to incorrect input or incorrect logic, which can result in unexpected behavior or unexpected results. This is called a bug, and bugs need to be fixed to ensure the program does what it was written for originally.

Every programmer has their own set of best practices, but some of the key aspects of a program are readability, support information, and indentation.