On a serious note tho, I never understood the benefits of GNU’s spaces after functions. I don’t really mind most of the rest but I just don’t get the benefits of ‘funcname (arg)’ vs. ‘funcname(arg)’. Is there a specific reason for this? Personally, I find this to reduce readability because I have to think for a split second whether I’m looking at a variable or a function call.
Of cause this is also due to my habits, but I’m curious as to what the reasoning is.
Honestly I think it’s just “spaces before open parens” and at least it’s consistent. K&R, which I use, wants spaces before the parens in conditionals and loops but not in method sigs or method calls and the linter at work gets me almost every time I type the word “if”.
Fair enough if the GNU dudes valued consistent spacing more than taking function calls as one “logical block”. Not my cup of tea but that’s what configurable auto formatting is for.
Allmans what I learnt then went to K&R on my own because it made more sense to me. I think GNU is fine I guess, not the others though. Not that what I say matters I’ve forgotten how to code and can barely do Hello World these days.
Noone writes Haskell like that. People generate Haskell like that because layout syntax is a fickle beast to generate and outputting braces means you can make mistakes in layout without breaking things, the way the braces and semicolons are output emphasise how they actually don’t matter, they’re also easy to delete in a text editor.
Also it matches up with other Haskellisms, e.g. lists:
See how it’s immediately apparent that you didn’t miss a single comma? It’s also trivial to match up opening and closing brackets like that, even in deeply nested situations.
Not doing that is actually my main pet peeve with Rust’s standard formatting.
Add comment