Only if a person’s machine is set to a tab size of four spaces. By this logic, we would need eight spaces for the people with a larger tab size of eight on their machines so they could be 1:1. Minimizing horizontal space is ideal as not everyone has huge horizontal monitor space to work with. But, everyone has infinite vertical space with scrolling.
If your code takes up so much horizontal space with 4-space tabs, you’re putting too much on one line or indenting too deep. 4-space tabs keeps your line length manageable.
Indents should exclusively be a single tab per indent, not any number of spaces, and width should be handled by the IDE renderer, configurably, rather than baked into the code.
If you use if (blah) { then when you fold your code you still see the { but not the closing } (I suppose some IDEs might be smart enough to do something about this, but when not it looks like your code has an overbite).
And then you’ve got a mental disorder if you indent your opening and closing brace more than the statement spawning them.
Noone writes Haskell like that. People generate Haskell like that because layout syntax is a fickle beast to generate and outputting braces means you can make mistakes in layout without breaking things, the way the braces and semicolons are output emphasise how they actually don’t matter, they’re also easy to delete in a text editor.
Also it matches up with other Haskellisms, e.g. lists:
See how it’s immediately apparent that you didn’t miss a single comma? It’s also trivial to match up opening and closing brackets like that, even in deeply nested situations.
Not doing that is actually my main pet peeve with Rust’s standard formatting.
Finally, someone understands that Allman is not that great, and that Kernighan & Ritchie is the way to go. Also, Haskell, my guy, you good? Lisp, are you ok? Do I need to call your parents?
I’ve written Haskell quite a bit, and I don’t fully understand why this is called Haskell style. Haskell code looks nothing like this, the syntax is completely different. For Haskell’s syntax I think it works fine, because I never noticed something weird. But this code in “Haskell style” looks absolutely insane
It’s sometimes called comma-leading style where you move all the special characters to the front of the line and it is exceedingly common in Haskell, possibly due to how Haskell treats significant whitespace. You’ve surely seen list definitions that look like this:
Allman or even horstmann I could still deal with, the rest would be difficult.
Though none are as bad as whoever came up with right aligning all the brackets to make any code look like python until you spot the deranged line of brackets on the right…
I cannot for the life of me find it now but the dude put it on GitHub
idk, Allman is very readable. Easy to scan vertically to find the matching open brace. Not quite as vertically-space efficient as the best way, but it’s not offensive.
I literally don’t understand. I’ve read your comment several times and I don’t know what you’re talking about. Sorry!
Did you think I was saying that made Allman better than the best way? Because it’s easy to scan vertically the best way, too. It’s just also easy with Allman, so it’s not offensive.
I don’t think they were disagreeing with you, I think they were just trying to say:
You shouldn’t need braces to be vertically aligned if your code is uniformly indented. Then you can easily see what code is paired together just by their indentation level.
Of course this is not always true if you’ve got a bunch of crazy nested indentation pushing things off to the right.
In my first ever programming class textbook was using Allman. Probably for this reason, it is easy for a beginner to match braces. It is a lot loss common industry to my knowledge.
That last line is the solution though, choose a linter, enforce all style arguments, so they are just the way the code is. No arguments.
Every single project I work on is setup with prettier. With Java there is a maven plugin that runs it on compile. And with ts projects it is part of the built pipeline.
I wish I could use prettier for Abap, reminds me how much I like having an opinionated formatter. I don’t like wasting time formatting code manually.
Abap has one formatter that is not very opinionated, and lets way more to much wierd spacing through, especially for a language that is as verbose as abap.
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