Exceptional coding style

[Artur Skawina]

On 01/18/13 07:45, Mehrdad wrote:
> On Friday, 18 January 2013 at 05:41:00 UTC, Artur Skawina wrote:
>> This is one of the reasons why automatic code formatting is such a bad idea.
> 
> In what language? In C# it's actually a fantastic idea.

Every language. Not only does it mean that the heuristics mentioned by Walter
can't be used (which isn't the main problem, as the error rate is way too high),
but skipping of the manual (re-)formatting-and-verifications-phase actively
reduces code quality by removing opportunities for extra review, discovery of
refactoring possibilities and reflection.
Sane, but badly formatted code is much preferable to bad, but pretty code. The
former can be easily fixed. Ugly code, that also happens to be bad, will be
found and fixed as part of that process.
Auto formatting loses information which makes spotting the truly bad code harder.

artur