Arriving in Javaland, I see that this unsightly practice is alive, well and pervasive. Even old colleagues who wrote C code with aligned left and right braces (just as God does) have shriveled in the face of Eclipse’s and the Java community’s insistence that you modify editor behavior (which I gladly surrender myself to doing) or go digging for a preferences file (ditto).

It’s a second wave of horror visited upon us a generation after Brief encouraged some of the most egregious indentation practices possible. (I, on the other hand, never abandoned vi for Brief and neither did God who must also consequently eschew Eclipse, something I’m unable to do.)

Yes, I think some of you have lost your way.

Anyway, a lot, but not all of the original thesis are doctrines I’ve long practiced and agree with. I also still practice, as a few others admit here, my beloved ternary expressions.

Code isn’t prose, but we humans still need to read it.

if (a > b) {
max = a;
}
else {
max = b;
}

is easier to read than

max = a < b ? a : b;???

1.) ?: is much less stuff to read so much easier to grasp
2.) In the verbose form I have to look at both assignments to see that they both are assignments to the same variable.

Naturally the Math.max is the best approach here but in other cases I appreciate the ?: as concise and clear.

look at this:

state = x < z ? “perfectly well” : “critical condition” ;

if (x < z) {
state = “perfectly well”;
}
else {
err = “critical condition”;
}

This only holds true with simple ?: . Nested ?: are completely unreadable.

For precise representation of indents, emacs users should convert tabs to spaces upon saving.
That is, in the .emacs file, include something like:

(defun better-save ()
(untabify (point-min) (point-max)))

(add-hook ‘write-file-hooks ‘better-save)

No shared source anywhere should include ascii tabs.

I am not sure if I want to find out what happens when a lot of people
are using different editors on the same python file.

Spaces/tabs are easily inserted/removed from a file. I really dont like
the idea that such changes can affect the semantics of your program.

if (a<b)
System.out.println(“a: “+a);
max = a;