Re: Indenting the source

H. Peter Anvin wrote:
> Okay, I personally find the style used in outbin.c (and quite possibly 
> other files) to be atrocious; it's hard to read and even harder to make 
> emacs not to butcher.
>
> I would like to propose making the following GNU indent command the 
> preferred style:
>
>     indent -kr -i4 -ts8 -nut -sob -ss -ncs
>
> ... it is very simple K&R-style indent with 4 spaces indentation. It's 
> not the one I usually use, but my preferred style is hard to generate 
> for non-Emacs uses.
>
> The commands mean, in order:
>
> -kr    -- K&R style
> -i4    -- indent is 4 spaces
> -ts8    -- a tab character is 8 spaces
> -nut    -- don't generate tab characters
> -sob    -- swallow optional blank lines
> -ss    -- space before semicolons in one-line for and while
> -ncs    -- no space after casts
>
> This is similar to what the Linux kernel uses, except the indentation is 
> 4.  I'm proposing to not use tabs simply because it makes life harder 
> for some editors to have indent != tab size, if people disagree then I'd 
> remove that.  I really want to avoid tab size != 8 though.

About 3.5 years ago, I proposed something very similar and still think 
it's worthwhile.  At that time, (see 
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/nasm-devel/message/759 ) I advocated:

indent -i4 -br -brs -npsl -npcs -nut -c33 -ce -cd33 -nlp -ci8 *.c

Some of these (-i4 and -nut) are the same; the others are as follows:

-br     -- braces on if line
-brs    -- braces on struct declaration line
-c33    -- comment indentation of 33 spaces
-ce     -- cuddle else and preceding '}'
-cd33   -- declaration comment column = 33
-ci8    -- continuation indentation of 8 spaces
-nlp    -- don't line up parentheses
-npcs   -- no space after function call names
-npsl   -- don't break procedure type

Also note that -kr is basically just an abbreviation for:

-nbad -bap -bbo -nbc -br -brs -c33 -cd33 -ncdb -ce -ci4 -cli0
-cp33 -cs -d0 -di1 -nfc1 -nfca -hnl -i4 -ip0 -l75 -lp -npcs
-nprs -npsl -saf -sai -saw -nsc -nsob -nss

The net effect, therefore of HPA's line is:

-nbad -bap -bbo -nbc -br -brs -c33 -cd33 -ncdb -ce -ci4 -cli0
-cp33 -d0 -di1 -nfc1 -nfca -hnl -i4 -ip0 -l75 -lp -npcs
-nprs -npsl -saf -sai -saw -nsc -ts8 -nut -sob -ss -ncs

And the net effect of mine would be:

-br -brs -ci8 -i4 -c33 -ce -cd33 -npsl -npcs -nut -nlp

Therefore, while HPA's line specifies more (which is a good thing, IMHO) 
the only actual *differences* are as follows:

Ed: -ci8 -nlp
HPA: -ci4 -lp

To borrow an example from the indent man pages, the difference would 
look like this with -ci8 -nlp:

p1 = first_procedure (second_procedure (p2, p3),
        third_procedure (p4, p5));

With -ci4 -lp in effect the code looks like this:

p1 = first_procedure (second_procedure (p2, p3),
                      third_procedure (p4, p5));


Because these are minor differences, I could endorse either, but I would 
very much like to have one consistently applied style throughout, no 
matter what that style.

Ed



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