Well, according to
you. Can you name a C coding style that
according to you gives you significant gains over the standard K&R style? That's the question posed in the article. Could you fill out one of those forms at the end of the article? If so, here's a good place to do so.
To knock an argument because of its form is only valid if there are no important arguments for which the form is actually helpful. For example:
- Premise 1. For chargeable things (cell phone, PDA, pager) there are only a few meaningful power ranges.
- Premise 2. No one power connector is significantly better than the others.
- Premise 3. It would be a good thing if there were one, or at worst a handful, of common power charging connectors.
- Conclusion: It would be good to think of all chargeable things as falling into a few buckets and having a standard connector for each bucket so I don't have to buy a set of new adaptors for each different cell phone, etc., that I buy.
Aha! The same form, a good argument. Or do you like the connector conspiracy? If you do, here's another one:
- Premise 1. For most Western European languages there are a finite set of useful symbols (letters, digits, punctuation).
- Premise 2. No one common encoding of those (A = 1 vs. A = 63 vs. A = 31) is better than any other.
- Premise 3. If there were one common character encoding it would make a lot of things simpler.
- Conclusion: It would be good to think of all the computer-stored text in the world as members of a single class of files and have a standard encoding that we all follow.
Aha! The same form, and now we have ASCII trumping EBCDIC, which was a good thing. Or would you prefer if each group defined its own "better" cahracter mapping and we have a world of programs to translate between the common ones, have editors that can read ten or twenty or thirty styles, etc.? Think of all that effort! Couldn't it be better placed elsewhere.
Isn't it better placed?
So you see, the argument form is fine, you just disagree with the weighting. Let's keep focused on your problem, shall we?
Now I'm waiting for you to fill out the form...
