RE: condingstyle, was Re: utrace comments

From: Stuart MacDonald
Date: Tue May 01 2007 - 12:23:23 EST


From: On Behalf Of Satyam Sharma
> readable and obvious at first glance itself. For example, consider:
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
> if (veryverylengthycondition1 &&
> smallcond2 &&
> (conditionnumber3a ||
> condition3b)) {
> ...
> }
>
> versus

Whoops! You've got an unterminated if there, let me fix it up...

> if (veryverylengthycondition1) {
> && smallcond2
> && (conditionnumber3a
> || condition3b)) {
> ...
> }>

From: On Behalf Of Scott Preece
> I still find the leading-operator style much more readable. The most
> important thing in reading a long, complex conditional is
> understanding the structure of the operators, not the operands.

Since there's a mix of pre-, post- and infix, the structure of the
operators _depends on_ the operands.

> However, there's a lot of difference of opinion on this (perhaps
> rooted in differences in cognition and reading behavior). For me it's
> not even close - expressions broken so the operators are at the head
> of the line snap into focus and those with operators at the ends of
> the lines look like undifferentiated goo. Since some of the style

I'm exactly opposite; the "uncorrected" line above is a typo because
there's no continuation item at the end of the line. I don't even see
the following lines because they are, by definition, not part of the
code I'm looking at. Leaving the operators at the end of the line I
easily see that it's a binary operator, and there's no second operand
so the next line must contain it, parse the next line as well.

Hm. I didn't realise this but the unspoken underlying factor for me is
the "one instruction per line" style. If you must break over multiple
lines, there must be a continuation item to indicate that. This is how
I detect missing semicolons.

..Stu

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