Re: Changes I've been thinking of...

[Nicola Pero]

> > > Additionally I really dislike the coding style, not because it's not
> > > mine, but because it fails to make the code more readable. On the
> > > other hand, there was code by Fred which looked really ok, so maybe
> > > it's just about using the coding style in a sane way.... All I
> > > wanted to say is, that it's not that easy to start hacking inside
> > > the GNUstep core libraries.
> >
> > Completely agree.  Good coding conventions are picked because they
> > make things that are wrong look wrong or generate compiler errors /
> > warnings.  The GNU coding conventions were picked by selecting at
> > random various bits from all existing coding conventions in the hope
> > that that would make everyone happy.  They are a horrible mash of
> > things.  The indenting style is horrible, for example, and only works
> > if you have your editor set up in exactly the same way as RMS;
> > mixing  tabs and spaces for indenting is one of the most stupid ideas
> > I've  ever seen.  The convention of putting a space after function
> > names and  before the open bracket makes code harder to read because
> > it makes it  difficult to tell without reading the context that
> > something is an  argument list rather than a subexpression.  In fact,
> > almost everything  about the GNU coding conventions looks painfully
> > stupid to anyone with  a basic understanding of how the human visual
> > system works, but as an  official GNU project we are stuck with it.
>
> I didn't know you have to stick to the GNU coding guidelines if you  
> are
> an official GNU project. Now I understand all the people complaining
> about gcc being unreadable...

Just to clarify for the non-developers, GCC being unreadable is a  
completely different problem,
not particularly due to the coding style. ;-)

Having a standard coding style for the whole GNUstep project is really  
important as it makes
it easier to copy/move code from one part of the project to the  
other.  Using a "standard" coding
style that is documented and used by many other projects is also good  
as contributors will
be immediately familiar with it.

The GNU coding standards are used by a large number of projects with a  
lot of contributors
and popularity so can't really be blamed if GNUstep is less popular  
than, say, GIMP (which also
happens to follow the GNU coding standards) or any of the other  
million projects that use the
GNU coding standards or some variants of them.

While I sympathize with David who prefers (or is used) to some other  
coding style,
the GNUstep project needs a consistent coding style and the GNU coding  
standard
are as good a choice as any.  Since GNUstep is a GNU project, it's a  
natural choice.

By the way the GNU coding standards are not bad, in fact I personally  
like them (mostly because
my eyesight is really bad and whitespace is much more effective at  
separating tokens than
brackets or commas).  There are some details I'd change, but they  
certainly are not an unusual
or weird choice for a large free software project.

If it's a burning issue for many developers, I guess changing the  
coding style to something else
could be discussed.  There would be *lots* of reformatting to do if we  
ever reach an agreement
on some other coding style. ;-)

Thanks