Re: [HACKERS] removal of braces

Bruce Momjian chortles ominiously:
> I have written a script to remove braces around single statements, if
> the statement is only one line in length.
>
> The macro fixup context diff was 1,200 lines, and this diff is 12k
> lines.
>
> Hope no one is sitting on patches.

Is this trip necessary? While I am a strong believer in aesthetics when
it comes to code (make it pretty first, making pretty code work is easy),
I am not sure I support wholesale changes (12,000 lines of diff) for
the sake of purely cosmetic issues.

It is somewhat costly to the developers as we will all have to pull a complete
new source tree from CVS.

It is also somewhat risky. Suppose the script makes an error some
where due to a tricky macro or suchlike. If this is not in something that
gets checked by the regression test how likely are we to find it?

And, for those of us contemplating larger projects where we might change a
large number of files over a period of weeks or months, it presents a
really scary merge problem.

That said, if you get my patch in before you whack the braces, I don't have
anything right now that would be harmed.

-dg

David Gould            dg@illustra.com           510.628.3783 or 510.305.9468
Informix Software  (No, really)         300 Lakeside Drive  Oakland, CA 94612
"Don't worry about people stealing your ideas.  If your ideas are any
 good, you'll have to ram them down people's throats." -- Howard Aiken