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From: grog@lemis.de (Greg Lehey)
Organisation: LEMIS, Schellnhausen 2, 36325 Feldatal, Germany
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Subject: Re: Indentation styles
To: jkh@time.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Date: Tue, 28 May 1996 19:29:49 +0200 (MET DST)
Cc: hackers@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Hackers), chat@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Chat)
In-Reply-To: <20757.833304229@time.cdrom.com> from "Jordan K. Hubbard" at May 28, 96 10:23:49 am
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Jordan K. Hubbard writes:
>
>> 8 is too much but we're stuck with it.  There is something to be said
>> for the discipline required to minimise nesting.  Don't right code like
>> this:
>
> Or you could be entirely heretical, like me, and go to 4 column tabs and
> 120 column formatting. :-)
>
> I used to be an 80 column / 8 column tabstop kinda guy right up until
> about a year ago, when I underwent a sea change and decided that if
> programming styles could change radically in response to increasing
> memory and disk resources, then it could damn well change in response
> to the bitmap display revolution. :-) At 120 columns, I now have much
> more room to display text, not needing to chop complex expressions
> into multi-line unreadability or make 72 column text (for output) with
> crap around it much more difficult to format.

This isn't really technical any more--let's move it to chat.

I suppose I shouldn't be saying this, because I wanted my suggestion
to be independent of my own position, but I suppose it's relevant, so
here goes:

I started indenting my Algol 60 programs with 6 character tabs,
because that's what the program drums on the 029s had set.  It didn't
take me long to get down to 5, and I've been decreasing ever since.
I'm now down to 2, and I think that's as much as anybody can stand.

In the early 70s, when working for Tandem, I found myself forced to
limit my column width to 107 or 108, because that's all Tandem's TAL
compiler could stand.  I haven't really changed that one: my xterms
are still 110 characters wide, and out of deference to people who
still run 80x2[45], I haven't changed.

> I also realize that this is going to be a highly unpopular position to
> take in these comparatively early days of GUI technology, so be it -
> just consider me 3-4 years ahead of my time on this issue. :-)

I'd say that any position on indentation is going to be unpopular
somewhere.

Now these damned hanging {s...

Greg