On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 10:12:43AM -0700, Gary Johnson wrote: > I think that's just a matter of taste and what your used to.
I don't. To some extent, yes... definitely. But some coding styles
really do make code harder to read, and code that's harder to read is
harder to understand.
The GNU standard:
- makes it harder to line up indented blocks visually, because the
indent is too small to be easily distinguishable given many nested
blocks (especially if they are not neatly balanced)
- makes it harder to distinguish conditionals from function calls,
both for the programmer, and for coding tools that try to care
- empty parens separated from their function name by a space look
like an operator (and indeed in some languages, they are)
- wastes lines with nothing but a '{'
The latter point may seem trivial, but if you're trying to READ a
function written this way, it can result in as much as 50% of your
logic being postponed to the next screen--depending on the contents of
the function--making it harder for you to refer to earlier parts of
the code without paging, losing sight of the part of the code you're
trying to decipher. This is bad.
Lastly, some editors / IDE's may rely on function calls being
formatted without a space [e.g. foo() vs. foo ()] to properly colorize
function calls. For instance, in VIM, this is the only way to
colorize C function names in your program (there's a keyword to tell
vim the names of functions, but it's really only useful for things
that are standard, or at least common library code). You can tell vim
to do this with something like:
sy match cFunction "[A-Za-z0-9_]\+("me=e-1
But! If you configure this:
- if(foo) will be colorized like a function call
- foo (bar) will not be colorized, since foo is not a keyword, and it
does not match the pattern
If you don't configure it, only function names that vim knows about
(mostly standard library / POSIX functions) will be colorized.
Functions in your code won't be colorized, producing inconsistent
colorization.
--
Derek D. Martin http://www.pizzashack.org/ GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
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