indent

[eric at skatter.USask.Ca (Eric Norum)]

"D. V. Henkel-Wallace" <gumby at zembu.com> wrote:
> I am relieved that the formatting changes will wait until after the
> release. But indentation checking is the easiest thing to verify:
> compile before and after with the same set of options and compare
> binaries. As long as you don't use a format like COFF that contains
> a checksum or compile info, the two binaries should be identical.
> Do this with a few representative configurations and you should be
> confident that the process was harmless.

Well......
even with an `a.out' object file you might not be able to just use  
`cmp' to check for differences since the debugging symbols could have  
different line numbers (from
brace-placement changes).

An automated compare of object files before and after beautifying  
would go a long way to addressing my concerns.

>
> My experience with free software projects that have many widely
> scattered developers who don't know each other personally, clearly
> shows that consistent coding, which includes formatting,
> commenting, and other style and convention issues are extremely
> important for long term maintainability. The literature shows that
> the same is true of more traditional development projects.

Yes, there's always the problem of ``Be reasonable......do it my  
way'' in this.

>
> For example why do we all use `for' rather than `do while'? It's
> just a convention, but one that makes it easier to navigate around
> the code. The same goes for indenting.
>

---
Eric Norum                                 eric at skatter.usask.ca
Saskatchewan Accelerator Laboratory        Phone: (306) 966-6308
University of Saskatchewan                 FAX:   (306) 966-6058
Saskatoon, Canada.