6 Mar
2021
6 Mar
'21
1:39 a.m.
I saw the light when my team presented me with a “Larry Stewart, Code Meddler” plaque.
I stopped editing other coders’ style on the spot.
I might have missed the discussion, but when did indent(1) come along? The interwebs say
it was
in 4.1BSD.
I went through a period thinking that indent with the project standard rules on checkin
was a
reasonable idea, but git at least doesn’t seem very friendly towards that sort of thing.
Left to myself I use no tabs (except in Makefiles) and 2-space per level. I think the
most
important thing is to maximize the code visible per screenful. Lower indents permit
longer
identifiers before the dreaded line-wrapping.
On 2021, Mar 5, at 12:19 PM, Richard Salz
<rich.salz(a)gmail.com> wrote:
In my own case, I had been taught the golden rule of "use the style that is already
in use" - which I admit, was a hard lesson when I was young I admit.
In my first Unix job (roughly 40 years ago), I read the vi reference manual and memorized
the keystroke commands. And then did
% cd /user/include
% vi *.h
to fix up all the indents and comments.
Later on I graduated to learning not to do control-p on a Vax console a second time.
What were your mistakes? ("Always mount a scratch monkey")
In