:> Question: how many people still limit their editor windows to 80
:> characters?
:
:Almost everyone in my group, since alot of development is done on
:laptops with small screens, or done remotely.
:
:Nate
I do, because if use anything larger some lines will inevitably go
over and I'll get complaints.
I don't think there is anything we can do in regards to the 8-character
tabbing. I've used indents of 4 ( but hard tabs of 8 ) for everything
in my entire life *except* the FreeBSD code. Short of us converting the
entire codebase to indents of 4, which nobody wants to do, there would be
too much confusion mixing indentation amounts.
We have similar problems with variable naming. The kernel uses pre-caps
standards so variables are named mostly all in lower case using
underscores to demark words. At least half the programmers I know
tend to use lower-upper caps for local variables, like 'hashAry' and
upper-upper caps for globals, like 'HashAry', and more are converting
every day. But, for the same reasoning as with indentation, using
anything other then a lower-lower-underscore naming scheme for the kernel
would only add mass confusion. So we have to stick to the old naming
scheme.
Style and Semantics are more maleable issues since so many of the original
hard line 'standards' are just too obfuscated to continue to use. I think
( and ignoring the really dumb examples some people have been posting to
try to prove the opposite point ) that some parenthesization and bracing
*must* be allowed for clarification. People have been doing it for years
anyway, we might as well codify it or style(9) is in extreme danger of
simply being ignored by the people who don't care for it. Complaining
that programmers do dumb things with parens and braces is a comment on
the programmers and has nothing to do with the clarification.
Style(9) is over 4 years old -- even older. 4 years ago, there were 1/10
as many committers as there are now. Accomodations must be made.
-Matt
Matthew Dillon
<dil...@backplane.com>
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