Basternae.org

I’m EXTREMELY picky about the formatting of my code. There are a few commonly-known formats for code: ANSI, Kerninghan & Ritchie, GNU, Linux, and Java.

I have a a very strong preference for ANSI style, but with one minor modification: I like my switch statement case labels to be indented. That’s not a strong preference, as long as the brackets look right.

This drives me nuts (ARRR!):

if( a == b ) {
return;
}

This makes me happy:

if( a == b )
{
return;
}

So, the fact that a lot of code has the former annoys me every time I see it, and I either change it, or frown and move on.

Today I discovered an excellent program, astyle:

http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

It lets you choose what formatting to give your code, goes through it all, and changes it to be however you want. The way I think code should be is:

astyle –style=ansi -s4 –indent-switches

All of a sudden it looks pretty, and I can read it without twitching. Not only does it do everything I mentioned Visual Studio doing in my May 15th post, it also rearranges brackets to be where I want them.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll bring on any programmers, but if I do, I’ll definitely have a stated “official lysanctioned” code formatting style.

One thing I’ve always found annoying is the way that different applications and operating systems handle tabs. In some programs a tab will move you over 4 spaces. Other apps will have different sizes, like 5 or 6 spaces. This can cause things that line up in one app to look totally out of whack on another.

When editing code this can be very annoying, especially if you check things by seeing whether braces line up and visually analyzing code flow.

Just yesterday I discovered some neat tools in Microsoft Visual Studio that I had never known about. They are edit->advanced->untabify and edit->advanced->format. What that does is convert all the tabs in a file to spaces and then reformat it according to the Visual Studio automatic formatting rules, which are perfectly aligned with my personal preferences. Because all the tabs are now spaces the file will look the same in any editor.

Editing code just got a whole lot less annoying.