A standard is a description of precise behaviors or actions that form
a methodology. As applied to a coding standard, it will describe the
form and style of code. Some of the reasons to adopt a standard
include.
Productivity: Includes the time for coding and maintenance.
The goal of our development effort has to be to develop standard
algorithms and classes once and then to reuse them.
Quality: An implication of code conformance to the design
specification if one writes code in a uniform style. Ideally, the code
will hold no surprises.
Maintainability: The code you write today is the legacy code
of tomorrow. The maintenance effort is the longest and most tedious
phase during the life-cycle of developed software. Particularly
academic environments with their extremely short ``lifespan'' of student
researchers face the challenges of dealing with legacy code if they
not chose to discard it in first place.
Understandability: The original writer of the code will
usually not be the same person that must maintain it.