On Sep 27, 2007, at 1:24 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
On Wed, 26 Sep 2007, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
On Sep 26, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
Personally I don't think that automatic formatting is good when it comes to communicating code between people who use the formatting to carry meaning; but between people who want to cancel the potential meaningfulness of formatting, an automatic formatter is the perfect tool, as you can't get any extra information out of anything completely predictable.
Having common code formats is standard practice in any well organized projects (check the Linux and GNU standards for examples). Many have it done autmoatically when you check your code in to the repository.
Yeah, I'm sorry, I don't know why I started talking about that, I could have guessed that you would be all about standards of other projects and not really enjoy talking about a communication theory of source code.
Standardization is part of communications theory. If there are no common rules, then the structures are meaningless, except to the person who wrote those particular rules.
"English" is a pretty well established standard, with lots of rules about formatting, indenting, etc. All across the world, even tho the English-speaking cultures vary quite dramatically, there are standards, so we all can communicate with each other.
.hc
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Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them, he must either change them, or perish. -William Carlos Williams