[phobos] excessive vertical spacing?

Andrej Mitrovic andrej.mitrovich at gmail.com
Mon Jan 28 14:00:39 PST 2013


Quote:

        @property SysTime timeLastModified()
        {
            _ensureStatDone();

            return SysTime(unixTimeToStdTime(_statBuf.st_mtime));
        }

I think this is excessive. What really trips me up however (and
there's plenty examples of it in Phobos) is this:

    if (expression1)
    {
        // ...
    }
    else if (expression2)
    {
        // ...
    }
    if (expression3)
    {
        // ...
    }

It's really hard to know whether the programmer actually meant for the
last `if` statement to be on its own line or if it's there by accident
and should have been an `else if`.

In fact it also makes it harder to add code, because you could easily
mistake this whole section as being an if-else-if chain, and add code
which is wrong, for example:

    if (expression1)
    {
        // ...
    }
    else if (expression2)
    {
        // ...
    }
    if (expression3)
    {
        // ...
    }
    else if (expression 4)
    {
        // broken code expecting expression1 is not true because
        // the programmer failed to see the else-if chain is broken at
        // expression 2
    }

That is error-prone, whereas just adding blank lines is merely an inconvenience.


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