From: David King Landrith <dave@...>
Date: 2003-04-09T02:08:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Style Question

On Tuesday, April 8, 2003, at 12:58 PM, Michael Campbell wrote:

> --- Travis Whitton <whitton@atlantic.net> wrote:
>> I've looked in the RubyStyleGuide on the Wiki, and I don't see this
>> addressed.
>> When initializing variables in classes, is it more common to line
>> up `=' or just leave them alone?
>
> I leave them alone.  the "lining up" I find just a bit too cutesy,
> and if you end up with 1 long name, the rest suffer from too much
> whitespace.
>
> Too, if you ADD something with a long name, you have to go back and
> re-adjust the existing ones.
>
> All this, for negligible readability gains.

For me, it's not that lining up the equals makes the initializations 
themselves easier to read (in that regard, I agree that the improvement 
is negligible).  Rather, I find that it does a good job of making 
initializations look separate from the rest of the code.  And I find 
that this makes for much easier visual parsing of the code, especially 
while scrolling.

And so I agree that lining up initializations is a bit too cutesy in 
reasonably short files.  In longer files (say 500+ lines), though, I do 
prefer variable initializations to be lined up.

> (All the above IMO, naturally.)

Likewise, of course.

-------------------------------------------------------
David King Landrith
   (w) 617.227.4469x213
   (h) 617.696.7133

One useless man is a disgrace, two
are called a law firm, and three or more
become a congress   -- John Adams
-------------------------------------------------------
public key available upon request