eric@snark.UUCP (Eric S. Raymond) (12/22/88)
The two most important thing to remember about style standards are:
1. Their payoff is in inverse proportion to the shop's average skill level,
and
2. Style standards imposed from above don't work and breed resentment.
I wrote most of a book on portable C coding once. We deliberately avoided
issuing any fiats about indentation beyond "be consistent!", knowing they
would be a pointless and losing proposition.
That having been said, I will now shamelessly plug for *my* one personal
style crotchet ;-). Religious flames will be ignored but I am genuinely
interested in what y'all think of my aesthetic arguments.
In general, I code in what I think of as "BSD/Allman" style with 4-space
indent:
int samplefunc(arg1, arg2)
char *arg1; /* args start after a tab column */
int arg1;
{
int foo; /* a blank line separates auto declares from code */
if (ifcond) /* extra spaces around conditionals annoy me */
{
for (i = startval; i < endval; i++) /* note space after ; */
{
switch (val) /* indent cases at same level as switch */
{
case VAL1:
c = b + a; /* note spaces around = and + */
break;
case VAL2:
function(arg1, arg2); /* no space before ( */
break;
default:
break;
}
}
}
}
Simple, clean, and editor-friendly. The fact that I was a LISP and Pascal
hack before I learned C is not irrelevant :-). Here's my one crotchet: I
like to write
do {
/* interior-stuff */
} while
(condition);
Why? Well, first of all, I strongly dislike do-layouts that crowd the condition
up against code in the do-scope, like:
do {
/* if there's lots of busy stuff */
/* happening inside the do block */
} while (the condition is hard to read)
Compare this with
do {
/* if there's lots of busy stuff */
/* happening inside the do block */
} while
(isn't this easier?) /* visually distinguish the condition part */
So the condition should be separated by one line from the block. The
reasonable choices for end-of-do-block layout are then
/* #1 */
}
while (cond)
or
/* #2 */
} while
(cond);
or
/* stuff */
}
while
(cond);
#3 strikes me as too much of a good thing. It would imply a start-of-block
layout like:
do
{
/* A */
which means I clobber 6 lines of vertical space in overhead for this one
construct -- no thanks, I've only got a 23-line screen!
#1 has the problem that the (cond) part doesn't fall on a 'natural' indent
level; everything else is at 4n stops, but it's at 4n + 7. Ugly. So I go
with #2, and I think that pretty much demands a 'do {' by symmetry.
--
Eric S. Raymond (the mad mastermind of TMN-Netnews)
Email: eric@snark.uu.net CompuServe: [72037,2306]
Post: 22 S. Warren Avenue, Malvern, PA 19355 Phone: (215)-296-5718