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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: Re: Which code style do you prefer the most?
Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2025 08:50:51 +0100
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On 27.02.2025 10:15, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Feb 2025 09:38:40 +0100, Janis Papanagnou wrote:
> 
>> Too deep indenting I consider to be a possible bad structuring
>> effect ...
> 
> Would you consider half a dozen indentation levels to be too many? I 
> frequently go that deep.

To be honest, I've never counted them. So why should I suggest someone
else what's a "good" value. Programmers certainly should have got (or
develop) a feeling about what's acceptable and what's too much in their
own playground (or in project contexts where many people cooperate).

But since you were asking I got curious; I pick one recent "C" source
from one of my toy projects and get this distribution of the amount of
indents

   80 -    // empty lines
  169 0
  254 1
  172 2
  122 3
   46 4
   34 5
    7 6
    3 7

What would be your typical indent distribution in your "C" source code?

(I wouldn't expect something completely different, but I also wouldn't
care if there would be.)[*]

Janis

PS: Note that your frequent indents of level 6 would in my setting with
a TAB of four mean 24 colums and would leave (for an 80 column window)
still 56 columns for "C" statements (in case you don't want to pass the
limit).

PPS: In the mentioned toy project I have 849 lines that stay within 80
columns and 38 lines that exceed that limit; the histogram distribution

    N  line length range
  172   1-10
  128  11-20
  106  21-30
   90  31-40
   68  41-50
   51  51-60
  100  61-70
  134  71-80
   28  81-90
    8  91-100
    2 101-110

where the upper range is in more detail sparsely defined by

amount  line length
     ...
    1  91
    3  92
    1  93
    1  94
    1  95
    1  100
    1  101
    1  107

where the longer lines are not complex code but stem from lines with
(long) strings in fprintf() information. Lines with non-printf/string
code are generally of length <90, or even <85 (the one long getopt()
line also has a long string literal, as I got aware).

[*] BTW; my hypothesis is that the actual line length distribution is
depending on the used window sizes. I had observed that folks who use
wide editor windows (or IDEs with wide windows) create wider source
code. I usually use 80 columns editing windows and thus naturally get
an indication when to wrap lines (without actively thinking about it).