in reply to Re: Re: Code review
in thread Code review

I disagree. Style often has objective effects on code quality. Style often has no effect other than the need to be consistent. Quality review should comment on style but note which decisions fall into which class.

For instance any indent from 2-4 is effective. So are various placements of the brace. However 6-8 space indents reduce comprehension.

For instance verbose variable names and abbreviated ones are not (AFAIK) significantly different. But flags whose name does not indicate what true means, and variables with meaningless names like $x significantly reduce comprehension.

I could go on. But the point should be clear. Without a coding standard to judge by, the various arbitrary decisions that must be made should not be advocated. But there are real style issues, and I think it is valuable to talk about those.

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Re: Re (tilly) 3: Code review
by husker (Chaplain) on Mar 29, 2001 at 02:28 UTC
    I agree that some decisions that we would consider "style" decisions do impact maintainability, and good maintainability depends on clarity and "comprehendability" of code. So in that sense, some critique of style is appropriate with regards to maintainability. So I would really consider these "maintainability" issues, and not "style" issues per se. Anything which is purely a "style" issue should be passed over.

    Other areas which affect maintainability would be documentation, generalization/modularity, and abstraction.