Marshall Schor wrote:
...
What's the benefit of prefixing member refs with "this"? I find it
makes the code harder to read. Eclipse can be set up to "color" member
refs, in any case.
It's essentially a matter of taste. The knock-down argument for me is:
there's a Java language construct for designating member variables, so
let's use it instead of everybody making up their own prefixes,
postfixes or what have you. It also helps you to discover problems
because you can tell Eclipse to create a warning for references to
member variables without the prefix: you suddenly notice you
accidentally referenced a member variable instead of a local variable.
My philosophy is, whatever can be checked by the compiler, should be
checked by it.
So here's a list of code conventions that I think we should get
agreement on:
- where to put the braces; I have an opinion, but it's more important to
me that we're consistent than that the decision goes my way. I find it
important because it changes the readability of the file, and I'd like
to be able to get used to one of the styles. I've moved between the
styles myself, actually, but it's time to settle down ;-)
- where to put member variables. Our code is the only code I've ever
seen that sometimes has member variable declarations after method
definitions. Even after years of working on UIMA, that still sometimes
throws me off as it just doesn't occur to me to look at the end of the
file for variable declarations. Can we agree to follow the Sun
guidelines here?
- line length. I have my line length set to 80, that may by a bit
conservative nowadays. 100, anyone?
- no tabs. Every programmer's editor can be configured to write spaces
for tabs, there is simply no excuse.
The following are less important to me:
- indentation. As long as it's consistent within a file, I personally
don't care if the indentation is 2, 3 or 4. I can live with any of
those values. Marshall and Adam have already expressed a preference for
2, and that's fine with me.
- some people have an opinion on how to structure import declarations.
I never use package imports, but that's mostly because Eclipse makes it
so easy to manage them.
If can't come to an agreement on some of those, that's fine with me,
too. However, if we agree to disagree, then can we agree that it's ok
to reformat files we're working on according to our own preferences?
--Thilo
