I’m EXTREMELY picky about the formatting of my code. There are a few commonly-known formats for code: ANSI, Kerninghan & Ritchie, GNU, Linux, and Java.

I have a a very strong preference for ANSI style, but with one minor modification: I like my switch statement case labels to be indented. That’s not a strong preference, as long as the brackets look right.

This drives me nuts (ARRR!):

if( a == b ) {
return;
}

This makes me happy:

if( a == b )
{
return;
}

So, the fact that a lot of code has the former annoys me every time I see it, and I either change it, or frown and move on.

Today I discovered an excellent program, astyle:

http://astyle.sourceforge.net/

It lets you choose what formatting to give your code, goes through it all, and changes it to be however you want. The way I think code should be is:

astyle –style=ansi -s4 –indent-switches

All of a sudden it looks pretty, and I can read it without twitching. Not only does it do everything I mentioned Visual Studio doing in my May 15th post, it also rearranges brackets to be where I want them.

It’s very unlikely that I’ll bring on any programmers, but if I do, I’ll definitely have a stated “official lysanctioned” code formatting style.