Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?

Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:

On 27.02.2025 10:15, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>

On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:38:40 +0100, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
>

Too deep indenting I consider to be a possible bad structuring
effect ...

>
Would you consider half a dozen indentation levels to be too many?  I
frequently go that deep.

>
To be honest, I've never counted them.  So why should I suggest someone
else what's a "good" value.  Programmers certainly should have got (or
develop) a feeling about what's acceptable and what's too much in their
own playground (or in project contexts where many people cooperate).
>
But since you were asking I got curious;  I pick one recent "C" source
from one of my toy projects and get this distribution of the amount of
indents
>
   80 -    // empty lines
  169 0
  254 1
  172 2
  122 3
   46 4
   34 5
    7 6
    3 7

This measurement is an interesting idea.

Gathering some statistics from what I expect is typical source for
my own code, and ignoring: blank lines; lines that are flush left;
and "non-code" lines; I get

   level  percent  percentile
   =====  =======  ==========
       1     69.6        69.6
       2     27.0        96.5
       3      2.2        98.7
       4      0.9        99.6
       5      0.4       100.0

giving an average indentation of 1.36 levels.  The numbers shown are
calculated by considering the amount of leading white space in each line,
and rounding up to an integral multiple of one indent level (which
is four columns).

There were some lines that had larger amounts of leading white
space, but they were not lines that reflect normal indenting.

What would be your typical indent distribution in your "C" source code?

Probably the numbers I gave above are typical.  In most cases the
code I write is very flat.

For comparison here are the percentages for the previous list of
numbers:

   level  percent  percentile
   =====  =======  ==========
       1     39.8        39.8
       2     27.0        66.8
       3     19.1        85.9
       4      7.2        93.1
       5      5.3        98.4
       6      1.1        99.5
       7      0.5       100.0

giving an average indentation of 2.16 levels.

[a bunch of stuff about line widths]

I almost never write C code with lines wider than 80 columns.  The
numbers shown above are gathered from source with all lines not more
than 80 columns.