NetNews Usenet Archive 1992 #19/NN_1992_19.iso/spool/comp/lang/perl/5539

Text File | 1992-08-26 | 2.9 KB | 70 lines

Newsgroups: comp.lang.perl
Path: sparky!uunet!sun-barr!ames!news.hawaii.edu!uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu!todd
From: [e-mail] (Todd Ogasawara)
Subject: coding style (was Re: Perl language formatting conventions?)
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Date: Thu, 27 Aug 1992 07:21:10 GMT
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Larry Wall) writes:
>In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (David Wuertele) writes:
>: What do youse all think?

>That's a religious issue.

>There's only one sure-fire way to be happy.  Do what you know is right,
>and don't expect everyone to like it.

>Larry

I agree with Larry's 2nd statement but am not sure I agree with the first
totally. I admit that "style," by its very nature, has some degree of
individualism. However, I suspect that there might be some way to quantify
some (though not all) aspects of coding style to help programmers make
source code easier for other people to read and interpret (or, for that
matter, for the programmer him/herself at some time in the future).

There were a few journal articles a number of years back trying to
determine how varying indentation size affects code readability (I think
the conclusion was that 4 spaces on a "standard" sized screen was optimal
though I still prefer 8 spaces :-).

There must also be some way to use some of the findings from vision
on processing simple (curved vs. angular) and complex (alphanumeric and
ideographic) images as a tie-in to things like parentheses placement.
One thing I've found over the past few years is that I and some other
people find placing a space after an openning paren and before a closed
paren sometimes adds to the readability of the code (this is not a 100%
rule, it is more like an "i before e except after c except in receive"
rule). E.g., (from C)

    while ((c = getc(fpIn)) != EOF) {
        putc(c,fpOut);
    }
vs.
    while ( ( c = getc(fpIn) ) != EOF ) {
        putc(c, fpOut);
    }

Note that the "paren space" rule is not used 100% of the time in even a
short piece of code like the one shown above.

I also think that the use of parens even when they aren't needed (like the
example above) aids readability. I.e., the code above is equivalent to

    while ( ( c = getc(fpIn) ) != EOF )
        putc(c, fpOut);

Well, as I said I agree with Larry's second point. I don't expect everyone
to agree with what I've said above. I would be interested to hear what
other people think about ways to apply style rules to make Perl and other
kinds of source code easier to read.
--
Todd Ogasawara, U. of Hawaii, Psychology Department
BITNET:        todd@uhunix
INTERNET:    [e-mail]