Why?? (prog question)
William Gordon Rutherdale
will.rutherdale at utoronto.ca
Wed Apr 1 05:11:07 PDT 2009
Oliver Fromme wrote
> Of course this is purely a matter of taste and personal
> preference. My preference is similar to yours, but my
> main reasoon is to save space. I think it is a ridiculous
> waste of space if every third line consisted only of a
> sole brace (opening or closing). To my eye, such lines
> that are almost empty break the natural structure of a
> piece of source code. I insert empty lines quite often
> in order to group source lines logically, but brace lines
> break that grouping visually.
>
>
There is a very logical reason in C for wanting to put the opening brace
of an 'if' statement on a separate line: preprocessor statements.
Many editors, including vi / vim, and no doubt emacs, have a brace
matching facility. If I put the cursor over a closing brace, say, and
hit the % key, it puts me onto the matching opening brace. However in
this scenario:
int foo( int x )
{
#ifdef SCENARIO_A
if ( x<3 ) {
#else
if ( x<2 ) {
#endif
// . . .
}
// . . .
}
matching the closing brace of foo() will fail, as the number of braces
no longer matches.
Putting the opening brace of the 'if' on another line solves this problem.
-Will
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