Now that I think about it, I may have subconciously absorbed this from Ken's and Dennis' code in the V6 kernel. Go take a look at it: more than one level of indent is quite rare in anything there (including tty.c, which has some pretty complex stuff in it). I don't know if this was subconcious but deliberate, or concious, or just something they did for other reasons (e.g. typing long lines took too long on their TTY's :-), but it's very noticeable, and consistent. It interesting that both seem to have had the same style; tty.c is in dmr/, so presumably Dennis', but the stuff in ken/ is the same way. Oh, one other trick for simplifying code structure (which I noticed looking through the V6 code a bit - this was something they _didn't_ do in one place, which I would have done): if you have if (<condition>) { <some complex piece of code> } <implicit return> } invert it: if (<!condition>) return; <some complex piece of code> } That gets that whole complex piece of code down one level of nesting. Noel