GDL Style Guide

This document contains the GDL coding standard of GRAPHISOFT, which mainly sets the formal requirements for writing source code.
It also describes a few rules and recommendations for the content.
You have to obey these rules in order to produce manageable scripts; by default every declarative or imperative sentence is a rule,
except where ‘recommendation’ (or avoidable, optional, etc.) is explicitly stated.

This document was created to establish a common format of GDL scripting.
The GDL language is insensitive to the character case and most of the whitespace characters.
As a result, lots of coding practices and standards exist.
This gets intolerable, when such practices meet in the same project or organization.
The following sections describe the GRAPHISOFT company standard, which remains purely
a recommendation for non-GRAPHISOFT related developers.
The supposed format will not be included in the GDL language’s constraints ever.

Basic Technical Standards

The release of new national versions, the growing GRAPHISOFT®
product line and the BIMcomponents® portal
have dramatically increased the demand for GDL objects and object libraries.
As a result, many independent or third party GDL programmers have started
developing libraries or objects for GRAPHISOFT.

Basic guidelines are necessary to keep these objects compatible and
to achieve the standard of quality people expect from GRAPHISOFT products.
The purpose of this document is to provide guidance to GDL developers in creating objects,
with useful tips and tricks, examples,
descriptions of previously undocumented and new features.