The great indentation debate continues!! (long)

[Michael Burgett]

In article <3261 at ingr.com.> crossgl at ingr.com. (Gordon Cross) writes:
[... lots of probably very relevent stuff deleted ...]
>Yes!!!  But "easily read and understood" should not be construed to mean
>"there must be EXACTLY this much white space here (or whatever)".  Our code
>was reviewed by QA types.  We had weekly "code inspections" in which the
>group would agree on how to correct any area of hard to follow code.  Almost
>NEVER was "hard to follow" attributed to someone's indentation style.  The
>most common were lack of comments, confusing comments, bad variable names, etc.

Ah, but I'm not attempting to say that the government standards are right, just
that they *must* have some standards to apply to the code they are buying.
If your organization was so on top of it, I applaud you, unfortunately most
(that I observed) weren't. And what you seem to be referring to is a 'code
review' not the fact that someone else may have to read and understand code
from 5 different projects from 7 different companies on any given day.  Not a 
job that I would want, but some folks in the government are doing it.

>You seem to be reaching here! :-)  Do you really believe that I (or anyone)
>would put untested software into operation??  Our code was subjected to tests

I'll have to answer this one with an unqualified yes.  Maybe not you, but 
I've seen poorly or untested software go out, to meet a deadline, because
there weren't enough qualified test engineers, or because the $$ on the
contract had run out.  (now you begin to see why I'm so happy to be a FORMER
contractor employee :-) )

>Again you are accusing me of advocating bad code.  Yes, the code should be
>inspected as it was and still is.  Looking back at my original (harshly
>written) posting, I see how you might arrive at this conclusion.  The
>"throughout eternity" comment was my reaction to the thought of someone
>legislating my code simply because it does not conform to that someone's
>idea of "pretty"...

Your idea of bad code may be SOMEONE's idea of pretty.  My whole point was 
that the government (read taxpayer) cannot simply afford to rely on the 
goodwill of the defense contractors (as they've seen time and time again.)
It was not my experience that (most) of the programmers were out to screw the
government, but that the management team that bid the things often knew nothing
about software and didn't budget for things like time required to establish
coding standards, frequent code reviews, etc.  

		----------------------------------
			mike burgett
		     burgett at adobe.com
	   "squid and red bean stew served daily...."