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Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: documentation standards for C
Message-ID: <8675@utzoo.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 28-Sep-87 22:10:31 EDT
Article-I.D.: utzoo.8675
Posted: Mon Sep 28 22:10:31 1987
Date-Received: Mon, 28-Sep-87 22:10:31 EDT
References: <9500@brl-adm.ARPA>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
Lines: 23

> What purpose does the so-called k&r indenting style serve:
> (personally, i dis-like it because its hell to debug).

K&R style has precisely one major advantage:  it is standard.  Any C
programmer can expect to have to develop some facility in reading it,
especially in a source-licensed Unix installation.  The same is not true
of any other style.

Personally, I dislike writing comments in English; Loglan or Esperanto
would be much more sensible. :-) :-)  However, the overriding goal is
*communication*, and the fact is that my audience will understand the
stuff a whole lot better if it is written in a language they are familiar
with.  The same thing applies to paragraphing styles.

By the way, there is a pervasive myth that K&R style is hard to use.
Wrong.  It is hard to learn.  Once learned, no problem.  I thought it
was hard to use and error-prone too, until our conversion to V7 required
me to spend a lot of time hacking K&R-style code.  Once I *really* learned
it, all of a sudden it was easy to use and no more error-prone than any
other (including the one I previously preferred).
-- 
"There's a lot more to do in space   |  Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
than sending people to Mars." --Bova | {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,utai}!utzoo!henry