Re: coding style

From: Linus Torvalds
Date: Fri Jun 15 2007 - 16:22:11 EST




On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
> |
> | from CodingStyle:
> | Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8
> | characters. There are heretic movements that try to make
> | indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin
> | to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
> |
> | Linus (did he wrote that part?) and the heretics both can have their fun
> | without impacting each other. If we wanted to force the user to have
> | exactly 8 screen blanks, we should use spaces throughout.

I did indeed write that.

Tabs are 8 characters in the kernel coding style.

And yes, I also wrote the other quote:

> Dunno who wrote that part :(. Jan, look:
>
> Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
> the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
> 80-character terminal screen. The answer to that is that if you need
> more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
> your program.

and I think that's in many ways even more important than the 8-character
tab, because deep indentation is unreadable even if you *can* fit it on a
single line.

In the kernel, we try to split functions up, and perhaps use inline
functions etc, and really really avoid deep indentation.

Linus
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