GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns [LWN.net]

GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

Posted Jan 4, 2013 17:10 UTC (Fri) by nix (subscriber, #2304)
In reply to: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns by rsidd
Parent article: GNU sed 4.2.2 released; maintainer resigns

But GNU's C coding standards are awful! At least the parts on formatting code. The BSD style, as described in FreeBSD's style(9) manpage, is much better.

This is extremely debatable. I happen to prefer the GNU style, for the simple reason that I evolved a personal style very similar to it myself, decades ago, before I ever heard of GNU. I find the BSD style exceedingly cramped and hard to read. Nonetheless, my current job involves 95% BSD indentation and 5% GNU indentation, and, y'know, I adjusted in about half an hour.

I don't know of any actual research, let alone replicated, analyzing the effect of indentation style on error rates and the like. I suspect any such effect is marginal, on the grounds that if a large effect was seen, we wouldn't see such a wide variety of styles and such anger over the subject. Without that, such things remain a matter of taste, and there are no real grounds to say that one code style is better than another.

Of course this does not change the undisputable fact that my preferred style is better than yours and anyone who disagrees is clearly a traitor and should be fed on by demons for the next thousand years and made to use Microsoft Word atop Windows ME as their text editor.

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