[PATCH] staging: rtl8723au: Fix brace coding style issues reported by checkpatch

Greg Donald gdonald at gmail.com
Tue Oct 28 16:55:53 EDT 2014


On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 2:04 PM, John de la Garza <john at jjdev.com> wrote:
> It seems like  you assuming the limit is based on terminal size?

Hmm, I thought it was because of 80 column punch cards and ancient
printers that didn't wrap.

> There is some research in typography that suggests that it is easier
> to read text that is not on long lines.

Developers don't actually read most of the code seen, over time our
eyes become trained to rapidly scan for patterns.  We've invented lots
of tools like cscope, ctags, lxr, and grep to further keep us from
having to actually read much code at all.

Your editor doesn't have soft wrap?

> Newspapers have a large
> sheet of paper but they use short columns.

Yeah, short columns with chaotic white-space.  The text fills the
column width and is both left and right justified.  I doubt anyone
does "text-align: justify;" to their code editor.

Who still reads newspapers?  The 2 people still using punch cards?

> My display is frequently greater than 80 col.  I see this as an
> opertunity to have two xterms next to each other, not to have lines
> that are longer.

Do you hear yourself?  "Oh, my eyes, my eyes, I can't be bothered to
read code so far out to the right, it burns, it burns!"

Or "I can read two lines of code in two different files from two
different contexts, but I cannot be bothered to read one longer line
from a single file from a single context.  I can multitask all day,
but I cannot ever single-task, forget that drama!".

All I'm saying is since no one adheres to it religiously, and the fact
that I've seen many times maintainers telling people to just ignore
it, the 80 character checkpatch warning is pointless.  Given that it
really comes down to a per-case best effort attempt, just set an 80
column indicator in your editor and try to stay within it, if you can.

Keeping the checkpatch 80 character warning around is just academic
masturbation.


-- 
Greg Donald



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