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Portions of this coding standard are intended to be normative and ; other portions are intended as good advice. The normative statements in these guideline are the requirements for conformance with the standard. Normative statements use imperative language, for example, "must," "shall," and "require.," etc. Normative portions of each guideline must be analyzable, although automated analysis is infeasible for some guidelines.
The non-normative portions of a guideline are those where we describe good practice or useful advice. Non-normative statements do not establish conformance requirements. Non-normative statements use verbs such as "should," or phrases such as "we recommend" or "Good practice is to...". Non-normative portions of guidelines may be inappropriate for automated checking, because they such checking would likely report excessive false positives when applied to existing code. Automated checkers for these non-normative portions might be useful when analyzing "new" code which that has specifically been developed to this coding standard.
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