Re: coding style

[Jan Engelhardt <jengelh@computergmbh.de>]

On Jun 15 2007 13:21, Linus Torvalds wrote:
>On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
>> | 
>> | 	from CodingStyle:
>> | 	Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8
>> | 	characters.  There are heretic movements that try to make
>> | 	indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin
>> | 	to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
>> | 
>> | Linus (did he wrote that part?) and the heretics both can have their fun 
>> | without impacting each other. If we wanted to force the user to have 
>> | exactly 8 screen blanks, we should use spaces throughout.
>
>I did indeed write that.
>
>Tabs are 8 characters in the kernel coding style.

That clarification ("in the kernel coding style") should end up in 
CodingStyle. (Since tabs *are not* just 8 everywhere, which current 
CodingStyle seems to imply. But maybe I'm just to blunt.)

>And yes, I also wrote the other quote:
>
>> 	Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
>> 	the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
>> 	80-character terminal screen.  The answer to that is that if you need
>> 	more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
>> 	your program.
>
>In the kernel, we try to split functions up, and perhaps use inline 
>functions etc, and really really avoid deep indentation.

This rule is also very helpful outside the kernel.



	Jan
-- 
(And IMHO, GNU code, e.g. coreutils, is the best counter-example.)
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