Wow. You found a part of NASA that actually has any coding standards at all? I assure you that they aren’t NASA-wide standards. I worked at NASA for over 35 years (retired about 3 years ago), and for the last decade or so of that, I pushed in vain to get the center I worked at to establish any coding standards at all.

I was greatly disappointed when I was directed at what was alleged to be the software development standard, only to find that it had not one word or one reference that had anything to do with coding. It was mostly about such things as management responsibilities and various required paperwork.

Heck, I’d have even been happy with the single requirement that each major application must be accompanied by documentation of what the coding standards for that particular app were. It wouldn’t have to be onerous documentation either; a one-line citation of a reference would be fine, or perhaps citation of a reference plus a list of allowed exceptions/extensions. I could not get people to even document things like what language extensions were used, much less style matters. More than once I turned in a bug report about the use of some nonstandard syntax which hindered porting an app to a different compiler/machine. The usual reply was that it worked on the compilers they were using, which seemed to be the only coding standard they had. They wouldn’t write down even that much as their standard (perhaps because it would have looked too obviously bad?).