Hello Jason, Monday, February 16, 2004, 2:21:01 PM, you wrote:
>> Consistency. JW> With what? With whose idea of style/formatting? If you hadn't chopped off the rest of my paragraph you'd have the answer. JW> I doubt you will find consistency in the real between different JW> programmers/organisations. If such consistency was there then PHP would've JW> have only had to support a single formatting style/syntax. You won't, but you will find standards that some people adhere to. Feel free to do whatever you like, I don't have to debug your code so it doesn't bother me :) JW> To me the alternative of escaping in and out of php over 3 or more lines is JW> even more of a mess. How is clearly structured code a mess? The line count is irrelevant. Your preferred version is a scramble of tags and code, mine is clearly defined per line, works in my IDE of choice (as well as others with brace matching) and follows the attempts out there of PHP coding standards (mostly inherited from the C++ fraternity). That's why *I* like it. We're not going to agree on this, but you're still wrong in saying the version I posted is "messy"; it couldn't get any cleaner even in an html escaping context. Each to their own. JW> It should be judged by its substance (ie the other factors) and not style. All That's like saying a piece of art should not be judged in its use of colour, but on the image itself - when in actual fact, they're both as important as each other. Children (and indeed adults) pick up bad writing habits by reading "sloppy" prose, you implicitly learn the style in-front of you even if the message itself comes across loud and clear. I see no difference with code. You're saying "if it works, what does it matter what it looks like". I don't agree, it matters a lot. JW> Good coding techniques/practices/styles have their own books. Everything has its own book, that doesn't mean it shouldn't be encouraged/implied in the more "beginner" titles out there. It's their responsibility as well. They should teach how to avoid spaghetti coding and how to structure code so you can return to it a few years down the line and not think "wtf is going on here?". JW> Just as you can't judge a book by its cover, you should not judge a JW> programming language book by its coding style. We can leave this here because this will continue going around in circles - but I strongly disagree. You can tell a LOT about the overall quality of a script by its coding style and structure - just because its printed in the pages of book I see no reason why they should be treated any differently. -- Best regards, Richard Davey http://www.phpcommunity.org/wiki/296.html -- PHP General Mailing List (http://www.php.net/) To unsubscribe, visit: http://www.php.net/unsub.php
