The exceptional beauty of Doom 3’s source code
Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 15th Jan 2013 21:24 UTC
General Development "I was really excited to write this article, because it gave me an excuse to really think about what beautiful code is. I still don't think I know, and maybe it's entirely subjective. I do think the two biggest things, for me at least, are stylistic indenting and maximum const-ness. A lot of the stylistic choices are definitely my personal preferences, and I'm sure other programmers will have different opinions. I think the choice of what style to use is up to whoever has to read and write the code, but I certainly think it's something worth thinking about. I would suggest everyone look at the Doom 3 source code because I think it exemplifies beautiful code, as a complete package: from system design down to how to tab space the characters." John Carmack himself replies in the comments.
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RE[4]: Good article
by Laurence on Wed 16th Jan 2013 13:53 UTC in reply to "RE[3]: Good article"
Laurence
Member since:
2007-03-26


Compare that to the C#...


That's badly formatted C#

I prefer the following:
if (X == Null) {
    Something();
    Somethingelse();
} else if (Blah == "Give up") {
    Somemore();
} else {
    ShootYourself(DateTime.Now);
}

In my opinion that is significantly more readable than any of the other examples you've listed.

Sometimes I concatenate the lines further:
if (X == Null) {
    Something();
    Somethingelse();
}
else if (Blah == "Give up") { Somemore(); }
else { ShootYourself(DateTime.Now); }

(this isn't the best of examples (and not helped by the formatting on OSNews), even I wouldn't concatenate specifically here, but sometimes it does aid readability.

edit:
The beauty Pascal is that the entire If is one statement with compounds, the beauty of the C# is that it is not (really.) Both have advantages.

You can use blocks in C-derived languages as well:

{
    if (X == Null) {
        Something();
        Somethingelse();
    } else if (Blah == "Give up") {
        Somemore();
    } else {
        ShootYourself(DateTime .Now);
    }
}

Edited 2013-01-16 14:10 UTC

Reply Parent Score: 2