[petsc-dev] I hate this one

[Matthew Knepley]

On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:15 AM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

>
> On Mon, Jan 21, 2013 at 9:04 AM, Matthew Knepley <knepley at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> There is no getting over this. This is exactly why people hate these
>> standards. Prescribing a few, coarse
>> features is fine and improves readability. Specifying the tiniest details
>> is senseless and intrusive fascism.
>>
>
> Uniform code means that we don't have to "look around" to find what style
> is being used in that source file. It also means that we can more easily
> write and verify scripts that manipulate the source. Most mature projects
> have coding guidelines that specify this stuff. PETSc had an informal
> guideline that almost everyone except you followed. Yes, we can read the
> code either way, but visual consistency is good. There are many good places
> for personal expression; source code formatting on a communal project is
> not one of them.
>

Again, there are limits to everything, and this surpasses the useful limit
to this kind of specification. This is not personal expression, this
is ease of reading.

   Matt

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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