Comment Formatting is the IDE's job (Score 1) 479
There are best practices and rules a programmer should follow and those should be set at the team level...call that "style" if you want. But formatting? Who cares? The IDE takes care of that. If the diff engine on your IDE or repository can't tell the difference between code changes and whitespace changes then something's wrong. I was on a (Java) project where half the team liked braces on a new line and half didn't. When I worked on code written by someone else, the first thing I'd do is hit alt-shift-F (Netbeans) to reformat the code. I'd do the same if I pasted some code...reformat the file to get the new code formatted the right way.
Our SVN repository wasn't glutted with meaningless diffs and I didn't face hundreds of conflicts when updating code. In this modern age (despite the lack of flying cars) it's silly to have to conform to one standard to make the software happy. Software works for us, not the other way around. I use software to format code the way I'm most comfortable with...why should everyone compromise so no one is happy? Just set up your tools properly and stop worrying about formatting.