On Tue 14 Dec 2004 16:21, "Clayton, Nik" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > > I've normally got enough going on in my head when writing code, worrying
> > > about the house style should not be one of them.
> >
> > Wrong. It should be. You write, and someone else - or yourself - has to
> > maintain the code later. This means that you have to write with style and
> > maintainability in focus. All the time.
>
> "style" yes. "house style" no. I don't especially care whether a group
> prefers 4 character indents, 8 character indents,
>
> if(foo) {
>
> }
>
> or
>
> if(foo)
> {
>
> }
if (expr) {
statement;
function (argument, ...);
}
> That's what the tools are for. Those are all religious issues that I'm
> not interested in.
Tools can seriously fuck up code, especially when embedded (database) code is
involved. We don't use formatting tools just because of that. (re)formatters
might work on machine/architecture A, but totally kill a specific
(pre)processor somewhere else.
> Not having to worry about those because the tools deal with them means
> I can worry about how best to express what I'm trying to achieve in the
> code (a) to whoever maintains it after me, and (b) to the machine that's
> going to be executing it.
Not worrying about those issues have taken far too much of my time in the past
because
1. Other preprocessors could not cope with it. Don't blame the manufacturer,
because it will take exponential amounts of time to convince IBM or
Micro$hit to admit it's their fault (yes, for me it was a faulty IBM cpp)
2. It will take someone later on an incredible amount of (lost) time to fix
the non-house-style to house style, because it /will/ be decided somewhere
in the future that everything has to be in house style, and that will
probably not be *you* who decides so. If /I/ was the one to decide, and
/you/ were the one to refuse, you are out. So it's also a good way to keep
friends with your co-workers and lessen the chance to be fired first.
--
H.Merijn Brand Amsterdam Perl Mongers (http://amsterdam.pm.org/)
using perl-5.6.1, 5.8.5, & 5.9.x, and 809 on HP-UX 10.20 & 11.00, 11i,
AIX 4.3, AIX 5.2, SuSE 9.1, and Win2k. http://www.cmve.net/~merijn/
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ [EMAIL PROTECTED]
send smoke reports to: [EMAIL PROTECTED], QA: http://qa.perl.org
