Date: Tue, 2 Oct 2001 13:31:12 +0100 From: j mckitrick <jcm@FreeBSD-uk.eu.org> To: Brad Knowles <brad.knowles@skynet.be> Cc: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: code density vs readability Message-ID: <20011002133112.B98079@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> In-Reply-To: <p05100334b7d8e6544d17@[194.78.144.27]>; from brad.knowles@skynet.be on Thu, Sep 27, 2001 at 04:26:05PM %2B0200 References: <20010927141333.A44288@dogma.freebsd-uk.eu.org> <p05100334b7d8e6544d17@[194.78.144.27]>
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| > One of the software engineers I work with (from mainframe/DOS days) has his | > code spread out so thin, you can page down 3 or 4 pages before you start to | > see meaningful code, and he seems to skip a line after almost every line of | > code. Not to mention spaces before and after every parenthesis, brace, or | > bracket. It seems this would make it easy to read the first time, but a | > nuisance after that. I just came to a new conclusion. I think code formatting and personal style might be directly related to the editor preferred. This programmer has used Brief for years, and the other programmers here use Visual Studio's editor (blech!). With Emacs, I get parenthesis/brace matching, auto-formatting, better searches, comment handling, etc that make a lot of whitespace unnecessary. All of this occurred to me as I was reading some new VS code that also has spaces before and after parentheses. It's because the editor does not match pairs, so they rely on visual cues to do it themselves. God, i love real editors. And i've only been using them a relatively short time. I can imagine how the veterans feel about modern editors. Interesting, our Japanese team hates VS and only uses it for compilation. They all use a programmer's editor for any real work. That seems to be the case in Europe as well. It seems only US programmers (the new ones, anyway) have been snowed by the MS dominance of programming tools. jm -- My other computer is your windows box. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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