How do you think about the flooding of bracket?

[Georg Wrede]

Daniel Keep wrote:
> 
> BLS wrote:
> 
>> "Deewiant" <deewiant.doesnotlike.spam at gmail.com> schreef in bericht
>>  news:e6rno9$1ju8$1 at digitaldaemon.com...
>> 
>>>> I find something like that gets very annoying quickly, when
>>>> "PROCEDURE
>> 
>> xyz" is
>> 
>>> one or two lines long. Imagine something like (mixed-syntax
>>> pseudocode):
>> 
>> Hi Deewiant, a two line inner function seems , at least to me, to
>> be a quit seldom used construction.
> 
> Well, that depends on your coding style, really.
> 
> Personally, I prefer to write lots of small, well-defined functions.
> If I can't fit a whole function's flow into my head at once, then I
> know I need to break it up.

Kudos, Daniel, for saying that!!

I used to write long functions, but then I got a peek at Turbo Pascal 
5.5 library source code, and I was simply astounded. Very few of the 
functions (or procedures) were more than 5 lines of [actual] code!

I think this was the reason why Borland was able to release new versions 
of their Pascal and the IDE, quite often, and had very few bugs in them. 
This coding style is actually encouraged in Java documentation, and the 
compiler is supposed to optimise away much of the "unneeded function 
calls", and do automatic inlining of stuff that gets only used in a 
couple of places -- by default.

 From that day on, I myself could tackle much bigger projects, and 
modifying and rewriting became pleasant, instead of being a nightmare.

(I think programming is taught in such a way that people don't get in a 
habit of, or see the value in, keeping functions short.)

Another thing they used was function and identifier names that let the 
naive reader instantly see what was going on. (Sure, it takes "more 
ink", but when somebody else has to edit your code one day, the 
difference is like night and day.)

> One interesting approach to this problem I've seen is in Nemerle: it 
> supports both C-style syntax and, with the flip of a compiler switch,
>  Python-style indenting.

Dot Net, anyone? ;-(