🚀 go-pugleaf

"Jim Sculley" <niceguy@abraxis.com> wrote in message
news:3D46DAF3.1070507@abraxis.com...
> Tim Tyler wrote:
> > In comp.lang.java.advocacy Dale King <KingD@tce.com> wrote:
> > : "Roedy Green" <roedy@mindprod.com> wrote in message
> >
> > :> I would hope most of the alignment would be automatic.  Programmers
> > :> waste far too much time fiddling around with such minutiae an
aligning
> > :> Java text is some personal anally retentive way.
> >
> > : Which was my point that intra-line alignment is not a good idea.
> >
> > Intra-line alignment not a good idea?

Not for portability and for maintainability. It takes effort to keep these
things lined up.

> > You mean things like:
> >
> > check("foo",    previous, current);
> > check("wibble", current,  next);
> > check("parf",   next,     previous);

Note that this does not line up in my news reader as I use a proportional
font. It is only portable between contexts that use a non-proportional font.

The maintainability comes in when you have to modify the code. Change the
text for these things and you end up wasting time fixing the alignment. Code
complete talks about this in a place that it occurs frequently, end of line
comments like:

    someCode();                     // a comment

Trying to keep a series of these type of comments lined up is an exercise in
futility. That is why I quickly abandoned end of line comments altogether.
All comments go on a line by themselves.

> I wouldn't be caught dead writing like that.  In any event, I think Dale
> meant something more like:

Actually I didn't.

> someReallLongeMethodNameWithManyArguments(aReallyLongArgument,
>                                            anotherLongArgument,
>                                            theLastArgument);
> doOtherStuff();
> ...
> ...
>
> Sometimes I do it as shown above, and other times I do it like this:
>
> someReallLongeMethodNameWithAlotOfArguments(
>          aReallyLongArgument, anotherLongArgument, theLastArgument);
> doOtherStuff();

Once again, I am using a non-proportional font so these do not line up. I do
the same. I sometimes do it one way or the other.

But in this case at least all of those lines will line up with each other,
just not with the first line.

> I haven't settled on a pattern for doing so, but the latter is becoming
> more prevalent in my code because it is immune to changes in the method
> name and parameter name lengths.

Same with me. Luckily with OO the frequency of this sort of thing is much
less.

> > That sounds like one of Dale's more radical ones ;-)
> >
> > Call me "anally retentive" - but isn't that useful in conjunction with
> > block-editing?
>
> I've yet to find a need for block editing (particularly in Java code),
> but I won't go so far as to say that others don't need it.

I certainly don't use block-editing much with Java (although that may be
more because it is not available in Eclipse). It was much handier with C,
particularly with tables.

--
  Dale King