C code

Code written in the C language  must conform to the ANSI definition of the Programming Language C as specified in ISO/IEC Std. 9899-1990[5]. In addition, the following rules must be followed:

• Structures and unions must be defined by typedef declarations.
• Structures must always be passed to or returned by functions using pointers.
• Include files may not contain executable code statements.
• Each module must contain a comment header block which defines name, purpose, author, version etc. (see Section ).
• All modules using the interfaces defined in Appendix A must include the header file 'midas_def.h' which contains standard definitions and proto-types.
• Use of proto-types is encouraged however they should be made conditional on the definition of the '__STDC__' variable so that code still can be complied with K&R compilers.

To make the code easier to understand, the usage of frequent comments, meaningful variable names and spaces between elements are recommended, whereas goto statements are strongly discouraged. The portability of the code must be verified by using the UNIX lint utility or a similar tool. Any potential problems reported by this utility must be corrected.