Re: pgindent versus struct members and typedefs

Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>

From: Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>
To: Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>, Rahila Syed <rahilasyed90@gmail.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-12-03T15:35:53Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On 2025-12-02 Tu 6:31 PM, Chao Li wrote:
>
>> On Dec 3, 2025, at 07:13, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>
>> Chao Li<li.evan.chao@gmail.com> writes:
>>>> On Dec 3, 2025, at 06:51, Tom Lane<tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>>>> In this case, I think pgindent is indirectly enforcing good style.
>>>> I do not like omitting braces around anything that's more than one
>>>> line; readers have to pay close attention to whether the code is
>>>> doing what it was intended to.
>>> For “one line”, do you mean only a single line of statement or one line statement plus one line comment?
>> In my head, a comment and a statement are two lines, and so need
>> wrapping braces as much as two statements would do.  I realize that
>> C compilers think differently, but for readability and modifiability
>> reasons that's the approach I take.
>>
> Totally agreed. In my first job at Lucent Technologies, the coding standard was that braces should always be added even if a clause has only one line of code. I remember one of the explanations was like, if braces has been added, then later when a new line of code is added to the clause, there is only one line of diff, otherwise braces need to be added, so it would be 3 lines of diffs.
>

+1. One of the things I find particularly un-aesthetic is having some 
branches of an if statement with braces and some without. We have lots 
of cases of that, but I try to avoid it.


cheers


andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB:https://www.enterprisedb.com