D pullrequest review process rant

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Wednesday, May 08, 2013 14:08:10 Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> Personally, I find that good readability sometimes dictates selective
> exceptions to a codebase's usual style guidelines. That is, I find
> that code formatting rules are best used as general guideline or
> rules-of-thumb, rather than strict hard and fast rules. Automated
> formatting enforcement would get in the way of that.

Exactly, code formatters inevitably end up mangling code or just plain 
formatting some of it badly, because sometimes you need to make exceptions to 
the formatting rules in order to format the code in an appropriately legible 
and maintainable way. They may help make things more consistent, but they just 
aren't flexible enough, and I very much hope that we never have to deal with 
one in Phobos. Basic stuff like where the braces go and spaces vs tabs might be 
okay, but I definitely don't want to see anything trying to automatically 
formatting code with regards to where spaces go or how many there are or where 
lines are broken up (which is a classic case where formatters tend to do 
badly) or anything like that.

- Jonathan M Davis