Re: coding style

[Linus Torvalds <torvalds@linux-foundation.org>]

On Fri, 15 Jun 2007, Cyrill Gorcunov wrote:
> | 
> | 	from CodingStyle:
> | 	Tabs are 8 characters, and thus indentations are also 8
> | 	characters.  There are heretic movements that try to make
> | 	indentations 4 (or even 2!) characters deep, and that is akin
> | 	to trying to define the value of PI to be 3.
> | 
> | Linus (did he wrote that part?) and the heretics both can have their fun 
> | without impacting each other. If we wanted to force the user to have 
> | exactly 8 screen blanks, we should use spaces throughout.

I did indeed write that.

Tabs are 8 characters in the kernel coding style.

And yes, I also wrote the other quote:

> Dunno who wrote that part :(. Jan, look:
> 
> 	Now, some people will claim that having 8-character indentations makes
> 	the code move too far to the right, and makes it hard to read on a
> 	80-character terminal screen.  The answer to that is that if you need
> 	more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix
> 	your program.

and I think that's in many ways even more important than the 8-character 
tab, because deep indentation is unreadable even if you *can* fit it on a 
single line.

In the kernel, we try to split functions up, and perhaps use inline 
functions etc, and really really avoid deep indentation.

		Linus