Just curious here... can I infer from the ascii art argument, that you are also against spaces for indentation, but for tabs?
On Oct 14, 7:56 pm, Cédric Beust ♔ <[email protected]> wrote: > On Thu, Oct 14, 2010 at 10:19 AM, Josh Berry <[email protected]> wrote: > > I mean, is: > > > public void Foo(int x, > > int y > > String z) { > > ... > > } > > > truly that unreadable? > > This is pretty readable but overall, you shouldn't be using ASCII art in > code. > > Here is why. > > First of all, you put a burden on developers to spend time neatly aligning > their code. That's a lot of space pressing and deleting, eyeballing and > doing it again. > > Second, they have to realign everything whenever a refactoring occurs (say, > you rename a method) or even simple changes are made to the code (e.g. > adding a parameter or changing a type). > > But the worst part is that the two points above make merging and diffing a > nightmare. Suddenly, every single commit is a mix of real changes and > cosmetic changes. Lines get flagged as changes just because the amount of > spaces in front of the first letter has changed. > > It's really, really painful. > > All of this explains why most organizations forbid ASCII art in the code. > It's just easier for writing code, reading code, merging and diffing code > and it's not that much more unreadable than the alternative (FYI, that's the > code style that Google imposes). > > I find that simply breaking lines at your column limit (I like 100) and > making extra indentations if the line is a continuation to be very readable > and an approach that mitigates all the problems above considerably. > > -- > Cédric -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
