Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Quentin Mathé]

Le 9 oct. 2009 à 20:48, Matt Rice a écrit :

> On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 1:37 AM, Nicola Pero
> <address@hidden> wrote:
> > >
> > By the way the GNU coding standards are not bad, in fact I  
> > personally like
> > them (mostly because
> > my eyesight is really bad and whitespace is much more effective at
> > separating tokens than
> > brackets or commas).  There are some details I'd change, but they  
> > certainly
> > are not an unusual
> > or weird choice for a large free software project.
>
> To me it is about separating groups of tokens, e.g. if you are going
> to separate like this
>
> [thing foo: arg1 bar: arg2];
>
> and insist on including that space between the 'foo:arg1' group,
> the whole message send looks androgynous with parts of the selectors
> mixed in with their arguments...
>
> compared with
> [thing foo:arg1 bar:arg2];
>
> it is very easy for me to pick out which args go with which parts of
> the selector, and
> which message is being sent...

Well it's possible to argue in the opposite way :-)
The first version is more readable than the second, because it's very  
easy to spot each 'colon + white space' combination.
Then you know the left part is a method keyword and the right part is  
the argument.
In the second case, 'colons' without white space seems slower to find  
because they are lost in the middle of other characters.

The first version is also closer to the spirit of Smalltalk, in the  
sense the punctuation related spacing is similar to a real sentence.
imo Smalltalk code with this spacing style is clearer than Smalltalk  
code without a space between each method keyword and argument pair.
This point is less important in Objective-C given the whole language  
syntax is far less clean (C syntax + brackets everywhere). But it  
still matters a bit I think. I agree I'm getting really subjective  
here :-)

Cheers,
Quentin.