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Pedantic Coder : Where do braces go?

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I've become rather pedantic about my coding style over the years.  I've worked in a number of people's code, and have always felt most comfortable in the core NT code because of the consistency of formatting, naming, etc...  This is a coding style that we often call "Cutler Normal Form" in deference to Dave Cutler.

Despite this I recently made a change in the way I place my braces around blocks of code.  CNF says that braces go at the end of the line that will execute the code block, as follows:

 if (foo) {
    do something;
} else {
    do something else;
}

I used to really like this style.  It made it clear to me when the statement being evaluated was continued into the next block.  Of course I always use braces, even when I only want one statement in the if or else clause, so this was a quick way to look and be sure i'd set things up correctly.

I've now transitioned over to:

 if (foo) 
{
    do something;
} 
else
{
    do something else;
}

This was the preferred style of the folks in the UMDF group when I joined the project.  It took me a while to warm up to this.  However i eventually found two things that i like about it.

First it leaves more open white space.  In my "old age" (i.e. mid thirties) i find that i like more whitespace in my code.  It improves the readability for me, and makes me work harder to keep my functions fitting on a single page - which is a good threshold for whether they're understandable or not.

The second is that it makes it much, much easier to put part of the block under an IFDEF.  This to me was the winner.  Now i can do:

 #if bar
if (foo)
{
    do something specific to bar;
}
else
#endif
{
    do something else;
}

Rather than:

 #if bar
if (foo) {
    do something specific to bar;
} else // note that there would otherwise be a { here
#endif
{
    do something else;
}

Or even worse:

 #if bar
if (foo) {
    do something specific to bar;
} else {
#else
{
#endif
    do something else;
}

Perhaps it's a silly thing to change something as fundamental(ist) as brace formatting style to get around a little inconsistency in how you preprocess out part of a conditional.  But i like consistency ... the hairs on the back of my neck go up when i see code that's not in my normal format.  So in the end this made me more comfortable.

This has come up quite a bit for me when debugging something or refactoring something.  When refactoring i'll frequently #if out a chunk of impacted non-critical functionality (usually replaced with a failure case) until i'm ready to deal with that chunk of code.  For debugging it can be useful to do the same thing if you're trying to track down the cause of a crash and are at your witts end.

And I've come to find it prettier.

-p

Comments

  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2008
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  • Anonymous
    February 05, 2008
    I've always preferred the more expanded version, though in very simple cases I'll write one-liners: if(value > 100) value = 100; I consider that better than the four-liner (including braces) and it clearly shows that only one instruction will occur. I'm still waiting on a mainstream app/plugin that transparently formats code according to the user (maybe at the checkout point?). Having code formatted as you like to see it has a massive impact on how easy it is to read and modify.

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2008
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    February 06, 2008
    Peter's a topic stealing stealer person. So rather than pout about how he's stolen my thunder

  • Anonymous
    February 27, 2008
    I am a bit older than you, in my 50's and have been coding for over 30 years. I used to think that the difference in bracing styles was a generational thing, i.e the old guys, like me, liked the more expanded style, while the young Turks liked the more compact style. It is nice to see some of you younger guys agreeing with us dinosaurs.

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2008
    As a coder in his 60's I concur with sidnsd and the general theme.  There ia a little program called astyle that does reformat code for you. http://sourceforge.net/projects/astyle/ Enjoy! btw

  • Anonymous
    September 25, 2008
    btw    value = max (value, 100);     // neat and concise

  • Anonymous
    May 25, 2010
    The comment has been removed