style

I have been looking at a few coding standards recently and for the most part, I am happy with the Linux kernel coding style (http://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/CodingStyle).  It has a very nice description of how to code everything in a terse but clear way which is something a lot of other guides lack.  There are two items with it though that I definitely do not agree with: the indentation for switch statements and the use of braces in if/else statements.

For switch statements, the coding style recommends having the case statements at the same indentation level as the switch statement (see below)

switch (suffix) {
case a:
	break;
default:
	break;
}

In my opinion, this is hard to read and the case statements should all be indented by another level (see below)

switch (suffix) {
	case a:
		break;
	default:
		break;
}

The style also specifies that curly braces should not be used with conditional statements unless one branch consists of multiple statements.  I completely agree with this concept for a single if statement, however, I think it looks a lot cleaner to use braces if there are multiple branches in the if statement.  This does not add a significant amount of white space (only a single line thanks to the inline braces), gives a cleaner separation, and prevents people from stupidly adding an extra statement they think is in a branch but really is not.  The change I am proposing is below.

if (cond)
	action();
else
	other_action();

would become

if (cond) {
	action();
} else {
	other_action();
}

With these two changes (and adaptations for things like classes and other non-C language features), I will be using the Linux Kernel Coding Style as my personal coding style.  There are times when I do things wrong (for example, I often do not put spaces around “*” and “/” just because my Engineering 101 professor instructed us not to) but overall this is a nice sound style guide and one I will be happy trying to follow.