Thread: Formatting Standards

>>> All companies I know have coding standards which include formatting.


The same here. It is because a firm I was with was trying to enforce K+R that I did the research that showed Allman to be better.

The simple truth is that most people are happiest/faster/productive with the format they are familiar with. They will do less well in an environment that forces them to use a different one. So, let all the employees use their own style but dictate a company style for archived code and supply a code formatter template which allows anyone to change to/from whatever format they like.

This is something that trips me up in Delphi as well. No brackets there, instead it uses "begin" and "end;". If there's an else, you omit the semicolon on the previous statement, even if it's an end. The default formatting starts the begin/end in the same column as the if (or whatever) statement beginning the block. If you get nested or sequences of statements within a block, it gets confusing over how many end statements and whether they need a semicolon, etc.
The compiler catches it, but it's annoying trying to figure out how many begin/ends are matching up. Not to mention the compiler is single pass, so you have to fix one error before finding another.

I prefer Allman also. I also like substituting spaces for tabs so they look consistent with all editors. I hate seeing posts where the indentation is 10+ spaces.

spaces are probably more superior in that respect, however it is much easier to tab twice than space 10 times (standard tab=5 spaces)
But, it is much much quicker when an editor or ide use auto tabbing. Textpad (which i use to code for the web) has autotab but it doesn't go backwards to the previous level after } whereas visual c does. For speed of codign i prefer tabs.