[TimCraig]

The primary purpose of coding standards is to make the source code easy to read. While the compiler may not care, source code MUST be readable by humans. If you're used to the standard in place, sometimes you can glance at a piece of code and know there's a problem because it just doesn't look "right". When the body of code is uniform, it's just easier to read and understand. This may not seem all that important on small projects like the control code for a FIRST robot, but for real projects of half a million lines of code, it becomes very important for productivity. On projects like that people come and go and it's important that things be clear and concise.

FWIW, the example programs that come with Microsoft's Visual Studio are NOT good examples of how to program in a production environment. In fact, most of the examples roaming around the web are pure crap. Unfortunately, this obervation probably also applies to the majority of production code in acutal software products.