Page 67 - Programming the Photon Getting Started With the Internet of Things

code tidy is always best—it makes decoding bugs quicker and allows someone else to
easily read your code if you collaborate with others.

Indentation

You can see in some of the example sketches that we always use some sort of indentation
for the code in the left margin. Indentation is usually determined by the curly braces and
provides some sort of hierarchy structure to the whole code. Using the following example

we can see that we have void loop() as our top level and within this we have a small
amount of code followed by another sublevel starting with if:

Void loop()
{
int count = 0;

count = ++;
if (count == 10)
{

count = 0;
delay(1000);
}
}

If we added another if statement within the first, then we would simply increase the
indentation by a further 1 or 2. To indent from the left margin, you can simply press TAB

on the keyboard to move across. You might find this a bit tedious, but when reviewing
your code later on it will become apparent how useful this is.

Commenting Your Code

Comments in your code is text that the compiler does not read and simply ignores.

Comments can provide additional information to either you, as the programmer, or
someone who is reading your code. If your program has a lot of code divided into many
sections, then you can also use comments as titles or headers; this can be useful when

debugging code so you can easily find the section you need to edit or change. There are
currently two forms of syntax in which you can write comments in your code:

The single-line comment, and probably the most common one that you will use,
starts with two backslashes together // until the end of the line. So you cannot insert
a comment and then carry on with code on the same line, as the code will be ignored
by the compiler because it thinks it is part of the comment.