Coding Rules

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A "model life" is more than ten years. Its software, composed of a few hundred modules, is used by many people who are scientists or students and do not necessarily know every aspect of computing very well. Moreover, a well thought-out program is easier to read and understand, less difficult to modify, produces fewer bugs and is easier to maintain. Therefore, it is essential that the model development follows some rules :

- well planned and designed

- well written

- well documented (both on- and off-line)

- maintainable

- easily portable

- flexible.

To satisfy part of these aims, NEMO is written with a coding standard which is close to the ECMWF rules, named DOCTOR [Gibson, 1986]. These rules present some advantages like :

- to provide a well presented program

- to use rules for variable names which allow recognition of their type (integer, real, parameter, local or shared variables, etc. ).

This facilitates both the understanding and the debugging of an algorithm.