General

We recommend to use variable names which are easy to remember. We also recommend to write ``robust'' code, because this piece of code will be used over and over again, and it will be improved bit by bit. Robust means the following for me:

• Things which can go wrong need to be tested during execution and should lead to a program abort if the test fails. In my experience, warnings are not useful here since in the end there will be so many warnings that one will ignore them all. For example, one should test for memory boundaries. assert() is a useful C/C++ command, see man assert.

• As a minimum rule for the use of subroutines: Functionality which is used more than once inside a program has to go into a subroutine.

Personally, I think that for simulation problems the strict observation of these two rules are by far the most important aspects of structured programming. This is independent from the particular programming language; it is also independent from the object-orientedness of the programming language although it may help.