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It's not hard before the lack of blocks starts to make the language unreadable and easy to misinterpret.

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:

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

Actually apart from the lack of indentation it was correct. The Visual Studio default and the Microsoft Recommended Coding conventions all use that style.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/brada/archive/2005/01/26/361363.aspx

That's badly formatted C# "

Your opinion, and bear in mind, OSNews lost my indentation. To me, your code looks suboptimal for readability. I work in a large team, other people picking up classes and libraries I've written is essential. Standard style guides and conformity saves a lot of time and prevents prima donnas. Plus, having come from Pascal, those arguments just waste too much time. Suffice to say:


And that is just scratching the surface and not even dealing with tabs, etc. It's a holy war, not worth winging about.

For C#, the basic layout I use (and enforce here) is based on the standard Microsoft use in all of their sample code. Sorry if you don't like that, complain to someone who has write access to Microsoft's source repository ;-) Visual Studio also usefully formats this way - why fight the IDE?



I never use tabs, they are evil. I use 2 spaces for "Tabstop" because otherwise your code shoots off to the right at great speed. I would go for simple over terse single line every time. I tend to (recently) add in extra space in if/else if/method params. This is just a concession to a speed reading on a high res monitor. Text scans better.



Not exactly the same thing. In Pascal this is one statement:

if (x = y) then dosomthing else dosomthingelse(y);

and so is this:

if (x = y) then begin dosomthing; end else dosomthingelse(y);

and so is this:

if (x = y) then begin dosomthing; doanotherthing(x); end else begin dosomthingelse(y); end;


dosomething and dosomethingelse(..) are compound, as are the other examples. Like I said, the C syntax is sort of similar, but not exactly. Pascal thinks of the compounds as being part of a single statement, with compound elements. Where as C doesn't (IIRC.) The braces in C are just a way to create a block and the if/else links those blocks together. Semantics, I know. But look again at the basic Pascal version:

if (x = y) then dosomthing else dosomthingelse(y);

That is a pure statement, with no semicolon after the first clause. Geddit? :-) C would require 2 statements linking the blocks:

if (x==y) dosomething(); else dosomthingelse(y);