Hello Christian, Christian Schulte wrote on Wed, Oct 01, 2025 at 11:38:43AM +0200:
> issue pops up regularly here. Why? I can't think of any sane reason whatsoever why such a question might ever come up. (Well, misguided management might be a reason.) > When searching for tools to automatically > (re)format a source file to match style(9), I think the question itself is very misguided. The point of style(9) is to provide loose guidance to code authors and maintainers such that they maintain the code in a format that looks broadly familiar to human readers, with the ultimate goal of encouraging human code auditing. If a developer reading any given code thinks any particular style quirk in that code feels distracting, they can fix it. If no reader of the code feels badly about it, "fixing" it is nothing but a waste of time. This is not similar to running linters or static analysis tools or compilers with warnings enabled on source code: those may find bugs, which checking style(9) by definition does not. Automatically reformatting a source file for style(9) is even more misguided than running an automatic style(9) checker. Instead, the useful thing to do is auditing the code you care about, fix any bugs you find, and also apply KNF if you want to, during the same auditing process. But applying KNF without reading the code is pointless and potentially harmful. > prompting the AI Stuart is very polite. My answer is more like "you must be joking, Mr. Schulte." Yours, Ingo
