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

[Matt Rice]

On Fri, Oct 9, 2009 at 12:51 PM, Quentin Mathé <address@hidden> wrote:
> 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 :-)


of course... each language is different in scheme
(+(+ 1 2) 3) looks horrible compared to
(+ (+ 1 2) 3)

I'm assuming that RMS being a lisp programmer, this must be the reason
why the GNU coding standards do it this way, but that doesn't make it
right for objective-c.