NASA-Inspired Coding Rules

Use these rules to make code harder to break and easier to maintain. They are generalized from NASA Glenn Research Center's NPARC Alliance programming guideline for Fortran 90: https://www.grc.nasa.gov/www/winddocs/guidelines/pgmstds.pdf

Source note: the linked document is language-specific and Fortran-oriented. Apply the practices, not the syntax. Do not present this skill as an official NASA standard for every language.

Priority Order

When rules compete, optimize in this order:

1. Maintainability: another engineer can understand, modify, and extend it.
2. Portability: it behaves consistently across supported platforms, runtimes, compilers, and dependency versions.
3. Efficiency: it uses CPU, memory, IO, and network resources responsibly after correctness is protected.

Do not trade maintainability for clever speed unless profiling proves it is necessary and tests protect the behavior.

Core Rules