On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 6:27 PM, Matthias Clasen <matthias.cla...@gmail.com> wrote: > 2010/9/13 Thomas Wood <t...@gnome.org>: >> >> Clutter's (very detailed) coding style document may be useful here, >> since it has a very similar coding style to GTK+: >> >> http://git.clutter-project.org/clutter/tree/doc/CODING_STYLE >> > > Yes, I think we could basically adopt this word-by-word.
i know that coding styles are, as it says in the clutter guide, "arbitrary", but i would just like to mention one little detail that i find problematic when working on shared projects (and much less so on non-shared projects). this rule: ---------------------------------- Curly braces should not be used for single statement blocks: if (condition) single_statement (); else another_single_statement (arg1); ----------------------------------- what's wrong with this? well, completely ignoring the risk of someone redefining single_statement() into a multiline statement (macros are noted as "to be avoided", not illegal), its something much more down to earth: if you are attempting to debug somebody else's code (which happens quite a bit when hacking the internals of GTK), this means that if you want to add a debug trace for either (or both) branch of the conditional, you have to *add* curly braces. when you're done, you need to remember to remove them. so this style makes more work for anyone trying to understand/debug the code, and also increases the chances of patches/commits that violate the style guide. this happens to me every time i'm working on GTK internals - i have to tediously add braces and remove them. if they were already there, i would simply be adding debug trace lines, and then deleting them. anyway, i wasn't trying to start a style war - just a reflection that distributed collaborative development has some different dynamics than more personal or local projects. coding habits that make it easier for other people to debug your code (even if that means adding debug output statements) has always seemed like a good thing. i have no actual position on whether the braces-always-present or not is actually better programming in the abstract sense, only that they help out when different people may need to make independent passes through a chunk of code to debug/understand its logic/operation. --p _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list