[LAU] Ardour: exporting woes

Gene Heskett gheskett at wdtv.com
Thu Mar 31 07:27:53 UTC 2016


On Wednesday 30 March 2016 23:08:58 Paul Davis wrote:

> On Wed, Mar 30, 2016 at 10:29 PM, Gene Heskett <gheskett at wdtv.com> 
wrote:
> > What has become of the first principle, write READABLE code?
> >
> > I'll get me coat now.  This is a younger persons game, but its not
> > an improvement...
>
> How about instead of getting your coat, you read the uncrustify config
> code (and the rest of this thread), and you help figure out how to
> make what uncrustify did better?
>
> Alternatively, how about you cleanup Fons' patch so that it doesn't
> consist of 80% meaningless code reformatting and is actual something
> that a future developer could read and understand what was changed
> without ploughing through dozens of brace repositionings?

I have little familiarity with todays compilers, Paul.  And at 81, 
beginning to have short term memory problems, I am also well aware the 
effort would be fruitless.  My point is that the top example in the code 
Fons showed us a couple messages back IS readable and maintainable code.

I believe the function of the code as committed is unchanged, but its 
less than readable, and it would have to be verified by cntx, a checking 
utility I wrote 25 or so years ago just to verify that []{}()""'' etc 
stuff was in fact matched.  I also suspect that if the compiler is 
working well, it would generate identical machine code from that hard to 
read 2nd example.

Which leaves the question:

Why force a hard to read, hard to check for errors etc format on the code 
submitters?

It contributes to hard to find & fix bugs.  And for the savvy coders, one 
of which already piped up about the brace locations, it may make them 
reticent to submit what is a perfectly good patch.  I'd think 
discourageing potential submitters is pretty close to the last thing you 
would want to do.

But what do I know...

Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>


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