[boost] Re: Guidelines for library submissions

From: Beman Dawes (beman_at_[hidden])
Date: 2000-03-15 13:35:11

At 05:22 PM 3/14/00 -0800, David Abrahams wrote:

>2. The other thing I found was more interesting: my use of
proportional
>fonts had been a crutch. I had been packing way too much stuff too
>densely together. Making code look readable with a fixed-width font
>forced me to refactor things much sooner, before they got out of
hand.
>I imagine an 80-character line restriction might have the same
effect.

Code for boost (and similar projects where code is very widely
distributed, and/or must be human readable on a very wide variety
platforms) may be more constrained than for in-house projects.

How about this for the boost guideline?

----
Most current boost source code is formatted for fixed-width fonts.
Guidelines:
- Use spaces rather than tabs; there is no agreed upon standard for
how many spaces a tab represents.
- Limit line lengths to 80 characters; that prevents truncation or
line wraps when printing of your source code.
Source code formatted for variable-width fonts is used by boost
members for non-boost code, and will not be automatically rejected
for boost code.  Some members feel, however, that boost source code
should be somewhat uniform and so prefer the guidelines above.
Either Ctrl-M,Ctrl-J (0x0D,0x0A) or just Ctrl-J (0x0A) is fine as a
line terminator.  A few compilers complain about Ctrl-M alone as a
line terminator, or about mixing line terminators in the same source
file.
----
That last paragraph subject to change if the uniformity argument wins
the day as regards termination.
--Beman