Date: Sun, 24 Nov 2002 10:33:51 +0100 From: Cliff Sarginson <cls@raggedclown.net> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Style(9) question Message-ID: <20021124093351.GB51850@raggedclown.net> In-Reply-To: <a05200f22ba05d9465f9a@[192.168.0.3]> References: <XFMail.20021122160808.jhb@FreeBSD.org> <a05200f1eba04a864625b@[192.168.0.3]> <3DDF241B.FF30ACE2@mindspring.com> <a05200f22ba05d9465f9a@[192.168.0.3]>
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On Sun, Nov 24, 2002 at 02:23:53AM +0100, Brad Knowles wrote: > At 10:45 PM -0800 2002/11/22, Terry Lambert wrote: > > > That means that they are limited to holding in their head only the > > maximum amount of data that can be displayed on a screen at a time, > > so the more non-whitespace data you can display in a limited amount > > of real-estate, the better. > > I know I cut off the smiley. I know. > > On the serious side, this isn't a bad argument. I don't think > it's as good as "we follow the standard because it is the standard", > but it's not bad. > > However, I would observe that screens are getting larger, windows > should be getting larger, and you should be able to have more stuff > on screen at once. Indeed, I would argue that perhaps the problem is > that there is too much stuff on screen at once, and that this has > been a problem for some time. > Oh this is true, true, true ! > > In music, the silences are just as important, if not more > important, than the notes. In print publications, proper use of > white space is just as important as the writing. > > I submit that in coding, less dense spaces caused by things like > braces can help improve the overall readability of the program, and > thus the probability of being able to more correctly maintain it. > Yup, I agree, within limits. > > Or do you really want single-line programs that comprise tens of > thousands of kilobytes (or megabytes) of memory? After all, if the > goal is to cram everything together onto the smallest number of lines > possible, we can just remove all whitespace everywhere. > I worked with a programmer who did just this, He had written his own editor that just cut lines at about column 78, and he wrote program code in a continous succession of such lines, cramming as many statements as possible into the line. Whitespace .. pah ! It was a nightmare fixing his programs when we upgraded the O/S and had to change some things. He refused to do it...(unfortunately he was in a position to get away with this). Oddly enough his programs had never been found to have bugs in them, I mean *never*. The trouble was that he was the only person who could read them. -- Regards Cliff Sarginson The Netherlands [ This mail has been checked as virus-free ] To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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