This survival guide appeared in 1988, when compilers were noticeably worse than they are nowadays and the computer science graduates were noticeably more dogmatic. General The consequences of any error should be graceful. Code should be as condensed as possible. Code terminated at a space owing to continuation onto the next line should not rely on that space being seen at the end of the preceding line. Inaccessible code is obviously the result of an embarrassing mistake which must be rectified immediately.
Bad code is written by somebody else.
Optimisation should be done insofar as possible, especially the avoidance of repeated evaluations of the same expression. All variables must be set before being read. Variables should not be set if they will not be used before exit. It is wasteful to set a variable if its value is definitely to be used only once. Local variables should be re-used wherever possible.