About the stylistic note, Code Complete chapter 18.2 cites a study Program Indentation and Comprehensibility from 1983 which found that a 6 space indent resulted in lower comprehension than a 2 or 4 space indent did. But the same study reported that many of the people in the study self-evaluated the 6 space indent as being the easiest to read, even as they scored worse on it! (The same study found that an indent in the range 2-4 spaces was optimal. Which one you use doesn't matter, that you use one does.)

Your pair of 3-space indents amounts to a 6-space indent. Exactly the combination that had people's self-reporting about usability conflicting with their actual performance. In my books aesthetic judgements lose to performance every time!

Therefore I would suggest that you either change your overall layout style, or change from 3 characters at each step to 2.

Steve McConnell goes on in 18.4 to say why he thinks that a double-indentation style is a bad idea due to the fact that the resulting code winds up looking far more complex than it is. However the actual research he found didn't really show whether or not there was a large real difference. Therefore while I agree with him that you are making the mind process a large amount of irrelevant structure at a glance, I wouldn't say that item is nearly as important as making your overall indentation smaller.

In reply to Re (tilly) 3: On Removing Elements from Arrays by tilly
in thread On Removing Elements from Arrays by footpad

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.