Duncan Parsons schrieb:
if you indent as waldo suggests certain bugs or compilation issues can be more immediately apparent -
do the begins & end match up? It's difficult to see when they are at the same level as the rest of the code.
If indentation is "overworked" it doesn't tell you very much anymore. If nearly
each line is indented, then it becomes unclear and confusing to me. For very short code
snippets it may work but if you have 10 or 20 levels of indentation (nested WITH, CASE,
FOR, IF, ...) then adding an artificial indentation for each BEGIN/END pair would nearly
double the number of indentations and would make it very complex IMO. Also, the
indentation should be independend on whether only one command follows or multiple:
if a=b then
do-something
and
if a=b then
begin
do-something
do-something-else
end;
should be indented identically to stay logical. Having it
if a=b then
begin
do-something
do-something-else
end;
would also clutter it too much IMO. The chance of consecutive lines starting in
the same column is much less. And only they give a certain structure in the
code. Also, whenever I have an indentation I know that this means that the
linear code flow is interrupted by a loop or a branch.
Regarding missing BEGIN/ENDs: They may not stay out so much if they are aligned
with the block but you can still check easily whether each block (of more than
one command) starts with a BEGIN and ends with an END. Also, this is needed
much less often than checking the code flow.
Some places I've been like the begins to be inline with a conditional/loop
declaration/etc, but I've never liked that. With one (large multinational)
Their chosen style for if/elseif/else was:
if x then begin
code
end else if y then begin
code
end else begin
code
end;
Which I found to be as helpful as a ice teapot, as scanning down you see one if
with three ends and no context for what was happening in between..
Yes, I would also not do it that way. Just imagine a missing BEGIN or END. Or
adding another command in front of the second IF statement: You would have to
enclose the new statement and the following IF with BEGIN/END. But where to
place them? You can't see it immediately. But when having it formatted like this
if x then
begin
code
end
else
if y then
begin
code
end
else
begin
code
end;
you can immediately see that the new-command has to be inserted like that:
if x then
begin
code
end
else
begin
new-command
if y then
begin
code
end
else
begin
code
end;
end;
--
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