I used to manually reformat unfamiliar C++ by hand, if for no other reason in that it forced me to read the code and somewhat comprehend what was going on. Now, I've lost my patience and use clang-format, a great & highly configurable tool. I also use vim for Python & C++ coding, so I also rely upon the command "gg=G" to reformat the current file (this doesn't do much in Python, however).
One of the things I like about python is the indentation. It almost forces (or rather strongly encourages you) to keep functions short & sweet, to do a single thing in a function, and avoid too deeply nested structures. I've seen horrible abominations in C++ over the years. In separate projects, I've seen functions that were, in one case, over 45 printed pages, another over 65 pages. The nesting level was way too deep. I think in the worst case there were 8 levels of nested loops. This was problematic for many reasons. Multiple developers working on this function at the same time and attempting to merge was a big problem - the diff tool used by Clearcase (I know, a WTF, in of itself) would get confused and occassionally omit closing braces. Good luck resolving a compilation error by a missing brace in a 5000 line function. As a result of the pain I've experienced, I try and keep functions small enough to fit on a half-vertical, half-horizontal screen, with no line-wraps on a 1080p monitor. (I'm usually working in a terminal half-screen wide and use vertical splits in vim to see different parts of a file, or different files). On Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 4:54 AM, Cecil Westerhof <ce...@decebal.nl> wrote: > On Friday 27 Jan 2017 05:07 CET, Brandon McCaig wrote: > > > Hell, considering the code that I have seen in the wild it might > > even catch some extra errors that become syntax errors! It's not > > at all rare for indentation to not match in languages that don't > > require it to at least fit a pattern. > > I remember that when I had to amend the code of a certain programmer I > always needed half a day to reformat his code. Because he was very > good in copy/paste, but I could not made head or tail of his code > because of the zig-zag of his code. > > That is why I immediately like the indent rule of Python very much. > > My only ‘problem’ was that I used to put debug statement at the > beginning of a line to see immediately what the debug statements > where. But that was a small price to pay. ;-) > > -- > Cecil Westerhof > Senior Software Engineer > LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/cecilwesterhof > -- > https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list > -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
