Putting cyrus-future code in CVS. Also, code style

Patrick Goetz pgoetz at mail.utexas.edu
Tue Jun 29 13:22:42 EDT 2010


Bron Gondwana wrote:
> Also, a question about coding style.  Is it codified somewhere?
> There are a few different styles throughout the code, but there
> seems to be a fairly consistent style in most of the code.
> 

Having spent many hours recently looking over Cyrus C/perl code (and not
having had to spend much time looking at other people's code in the
preceding 5-10 years), I will happily volunteer my opinion that in
practice, and for future maintenance purposes, the K&R style:

  while (x == y) {
      something();
      somethingelse();
      if (some_error) {
          do_correct();
          do_something_else;
      }
      else
          continue_as_usual();
  }

sucks and is hard to read, while the GNU style

  while (x == y)
    {
      something ();
      somethingelse ();
    }

is just kind of silly.  Most readable is the Allman style:

  while (x == y)
  {
      something();
      somethingelse();
  }


That little bit of added white space really makes a difference when the
eye is skimming down the page.  Since I always use the Allman style and
am usually only debugging my own code, I didn't really appreciate the
difference until looking at Cyrus code.  Indentation doesn't matter so
much to me for readability, but I diverge from the norm by preferring a
2-space indentation to keep nested blocks from drifting too far off to
the right which also creates more work for the eye when re-reading code,
not to mention line wrap.  Mostly I don't think about this much, as vi
does all the indentation for me as I edit.


More information about the Cyrus-devel mailing list