Coding Style

[John W. Eaton]

On 20-Feb-2006, Bill Denney wrote:

| So, I generally don't code things the same way that is generally used in 
| the internals of Octave.  One thing I was just looking at was the current 
| plotting routines (with gnuplot), and I noticed that some parts 
| (specifically in bar.m) had
| 
| if (something)
|    ...
| else
|    error (message)
| endif
| 
| My general preference is to have code indented less, and I think that 
| less indentation generally makes code more readable.  I would code it as
| 
| if (~ something)
|    error (message)
| endif
| ...
| 
| So I have two questions:  is there a document that describes current 
| coding preferences in octave?  Is the previous coding method preferred for 
| some reason or was it just how the code came out?

I prefer to avoid negation of conditions where possible.  Also, the

  if (things_are_ok)
    do_the_intended_stuff ();
  else
    error ("some message");
  endif

style follows the convention used in much of the C++ code in Octave,
where I generally try to have only one return statement in a
function.

jwe