From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: fac41,9a0ff0bffdf63657 X-Google-Attributes: gidfac41,public X-Google-Thread: 1108a1,9a0ff0bffdf63657 X-Google-Attributes: gid1108a1,public X-Google-Thread: 103376,4b06f8f15f01a568 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-Thread: f43e6,9a0ff0bffdf63657 X-Google-Attributes: gidf43e6,public From: Charles Hixson Subject: Re: Software landmines (loops) Date: 1998/09/12 Message-ID: <35FB19F8.D3AAEC2D@earthlink.net>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 390567381 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <35DBDD24.D003404D@calfp.co.uk> <904556531.666222@miso.it.uq.edu.au> <6sgror$je8$3@news.indigo.ie> <6sh3qn$9p2$1@hirame.wwa.com> <6simjo$jnh$1@hirame.wwa.com> <6sjk3p$4tc$1@hirame.wwa.com> <6skgn4$3gq$1@hirame.wwa.com> <6sm6md$3fh$1@hirame.wwa.com> <35f1375e.6237208@news.erols.com> <35F74AEC.21982C2B@oma.com> <6t937n$ep6$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> <6telqi$aab$1@nnrp1.dejanews.com> X-Posted-Path-Was: not-for-mail Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-ELN-Date: Sat Sep 12 18:01:04 1998 Organization: Mandala Fluteworks Mime-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.eiffel,comp.object,comp.software-eng,comp.lang.ada Date: 1998-09-12T00:00:00+00:00 List-Id: dewarr@my-dejanews.com wrote: > > In article , > Ell wrote: > > > >: For me, the reason it makes sense to simply take majority > >: votes on style issues is that consistency is THE most > >: important issue, much more important than the actual > >: decisions (it's like driving, it really doesn't matter if > >: you drive on the left or right, but it is really important > >: to agree>>> > > > >Wrong headed pragmatism, pure and simple. > > > >It's ludicrous on the face of it to say all that matters is making a > >decision, not the content of the decision itself. That's like saying it's > >more important that we all decided to poison ourselves, rather than > >questioning the whole decision. > > What on earth has poisoning ourselves got to do with the > matter at hand, and what on earth makes you think I was > suggesting that the majority decision is right for all > things. If you must bring in totally irrelevant details > like this, one can only assume you have no real argument! > Some style choices ARE important, but in most agreement is more important than which style, and in some agreement is the only matter of importance (and in some, even that isn't important). I haven't seen anybody defending spaghetti code recently. This is a (practically universal) style (different things were being optimised), but agreement wasn't sufficient to maintain it. Whether or not the names of constants were written in all-caps is a style (actually, it's one that I, personally, don't like). It is the majority style in some camps of the computer community (C descendant languages, particularly). I don't think that it's important as long as that form is not used by anything else. Any good text editor do a set of global transforms on the code to match the style of the person who is using it, with NO IMPACT on anything else (actually, if the header files are shared with people using differing coding styles, then one set of the constant's names would need to be defined in terms of the other set of the constant's names (e.g. #define stdIn STDIN ), but this would only be needed in languages where the case of the variable name is a semantic marker, so Ada, for example, wouldn't need a comparable statement change).