C Indentation Survey Results (long...)

mwm at ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA mwm at ucbtopaz.CC.Berkeley.ARPA
Mon Apr 29 17:02:14 AEST 1985


In article <5548 at utzoo.UUCP> henry at utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes:
>> ...[customizable pretty-printers solve a lot of the style problems]...
>
>A customizable pretty-printer that can read minds, so it can sort out
>those formatting decisions that are determined by intent rather than
>just by syntax.

The LISP community has been using customizable pretty-printers for quite
a while now, so I suspect that the intent vs. syntax problem is
inconsequential. Of course, C may be different, but there is only one
way to find out.

>To quote our locally-altered manual page for cb(1), under BUGS:
>
>	A paragrapher cannot judge the programmer's intent, and hence cannot
>	do as good a job of displaying it as the programmer can.
>	Paragraphers should be used to deal with emergencies, not as a
>	substitute for doing it right the first time.

Correct, so I do it right and don't use the (to me, incredibly
unreadable) K&R format. Now, if only I could convince most of the rest
of the C world of this :-).

	<mike

PS - readability is personal things, and you *will not* convince me that
the K&R format is readable, just as I won't convince you that it isn't.
On the other hand, you might convince me to use the K&R format.



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