I’ll try to keep this short. Having been coding for years I’ve seen a lot of examples of how other people write code. Now while there are certain requirements in coding, there are areas where you can inject your own person style or preference. One area that has always bugged me is how code is indented and how brackets are used to separate blocks of code. Here’s a very simple example of how I normally code a simple if/else block:
if (hours < 24 && minutes < 60 && seconds < 60)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
This is known as Allman style (named after Eric Allman, the developer of sendmail). The most common variant of this would be K&R style (from Kernighan and Ritchie’s book The C Programming Language) and the same code looks like this:
if (hours < 24 && minutes < 60 && seconds < 60) {
return true;
} else {
return false;
}
Equivalent in every way except readability. Some people call this “The One True Brace Style” because it’s been around so long. The major difference is that the opening bracket is placed at the end of the line that the control statement is on where in Allman style the brackets are each on their own line.
To me it makes sense to make code as readable as possible by lining up brackets to match the block they go with. It becomes apparent what blocks of code belong to what conditions.
 |
| Allman style |
 |
| K&R style |
If I was to have another condition nested within the example, it would look like this:
if (hours < 24 && minutes < 60 && seconds < 60)
{
if(hours % 2 == 0)
{
return true;
}
else
{
return false;
}
}
Again, very readable.
The funny thing about K&R style is that its roots seems to be based in the fact that programmers used to have to deal with limited screen space and by squishing the brackets together with the blocks that they belonged to, it saved precious screen real estate. Most programmers either picked up the style they use most often from learning coding in a class or by following the examples set by others, while other programmers code for readability, especially now that space isn’t the issue it once was.
While Allman and K&R are just two of the most popular styles (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indent_style and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_style
for some others and a detailed explanation about the history of each)
(please pardon the less than perfect wordpress code formatting)