On Sun, 4 Jun 2006, Michael J. Mahon wrote: <snips here and there>
It isn't about beauty--it's about clarity. And there are *huge* payoffs in adopting a standard format for programs--as, indeed, most serious projects do.
I have a format of my own, which I adopted out of necessity - couldn't read my own code when it was all smashed against the left margin!
Not everyone likes to spell words the same way, either, but we don't care what they think--the convention is king.
Of course there is no single convention for C; I use braces on separate lines with an indent of 1 space within the braces, and my function headers are one line - and there is a minimum of whitespace against the last margin but it's fairly readable.
BTW, programmers shouldn't choose names they "like", either. Naming should all be within a simple, rigid framework, so that the semantics of any name are expressed by the identifier.
I use several metasyntactic names for throwaway variables (foo, bar, grill; travel, travel2, travel3; i, j, k; x, y, z), but usually it's something like "nolin" (number of lines), "curlin" (current line), etc. - an abbreviation, since I don't like to type any more than I have to.
-uso.