NetRexx coding style recommendations
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NetRexx coding style recommendations
 
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The docs that I've read so far are clear that NetRexx allows a lot
of flexibility in how its code gets written. However, I would still appreciate any wisdom you long-time NetRexx hackers might like to pass along as far as coding style goes. Is there a template on the Web somewhere that might summarize this wisdom? TIA .... -- Duke _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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A google on NetRexx coding style got over 10K hits.
BobH On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 7:45 AM, Duke Normandin <[hidden email]> wrote: > The docs that I've read so far are clear that NetRexx allows a lot > of flexibility in how its code gets written. > > However, I would still appreciate any wisdom you long-time NetRexx > hackers might like to pass along as far as coding style goes. Is > there a template on the Web somewhere that might summarize this > wisdom? TIA .... > > -- > Duke > > _______________________________________________ > Ibm-netrexx mailing list > [hidden email] > Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ > _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:59:41 -0600
Robert Hamilton <[hidden email]> wrote: > A google on NetRexx coding style got over 10K hits. and when I Googled before asking my question, I concluded that those hits were pretty much irrelevant to what I wanted to know! and please refrain from top-posting! _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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Duke,
NetRexx is, or used to be, distributed with a directory called, I think, 'browse', which consisted of a number of examples coded by MFC. I would characterize the style as lucid but terse :).
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 9:17 AM, Duke Normandin <[hidden email]> wrote:
-- "One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love." -- Leo Tolstoy _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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NetRexx is, or used to be, distributed with a directory
called, I think, 'browse', which consisted of a number of examples coded by
MFC. I would characterize the style as lucid but terse :).
Many of those early examples were deliberately terse because
they were intended for comparison with Java applets that were small (because of
slow link speeds) and often uncommented.
The source of NetRexx itself might be a better place to
look. Or for my current 'style', see: http://speleotrove.com/tollos/code_conventions.html
.. that's for C, but the principles apply (for C one has a separate .h and .c;
for NetRexx they are combined into one .nrx).
Mike
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In reply to this post by Duke Normandin
Duke, I can understand your pique at receiving an "Is it plugged in?"
response to your request for help, but there are several issues at play here: 1. You asked a newbie question (justifiably, you admitted being one) but gave no indication that you had done the simplest Google search already. (If Bob had been trying to insult you, he would have sent you to http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=netrexx+coding+style :-) A simple "I found 'way too many disparate examples on the Web to tell if there is a preferred style" would have prevented that response. 2. You are probably not aware that there is a frequent poster to this list who adamantly refuses to do a Google search before asking questions. He contends that it's easier for him (of course) to let everyone else do the searching and filtering before providing him with an answer. Your failure to mention your own searching inadvertently hit a nerve with many of us. 3. When asking for help, it is considered ungracious to complain about the form in which that help appears. Despite the absolutists on both sides (and brain-dead MUA's that don't give you the choice) there is no standard or consensus regarding top- or bottom-posting email replies. My personal choice is to top-post a simple response. This makes it easy to find the current response when the thread goes on for pages, minimizes the amount of history that must be read, and simplifies trimming the irrelevant tail of the conversation (which far too few folks do, imho). OTOH, a complex posting (which this note is rapidly becoming) such as the discussion of Nested List Support, requires insertion-posting in order that the sub-topics remain coherent. The only time that I bottom-post is when forced to do so by an existing bottom-posted thread. I find this most often when dealing with governmental organizations and large corporations, where for legal reasons they need a top-down version of the conversation to print out. The only thing worse than a bottom-posted thread is a random-posted thread. I've been know to manually re-arrange the quotes in order to restore linearity. :-) Please don't take the above as a personal criticism; it is intended as more of an introduction and explanation. We are glad to have you here. You will find that there are many others (including Bob and myself) who are not NetRexx wizards with all the answers. And when you can get a helpful (if bottom-posted ;-) reply from the creator of the language, you should know that you are welcome. -Chip- On 12/10/2012 09:17 Duke Normandin said: > > and when I Googled before asking my question, I concluded that those > hits were pretty much irrelevant to what I wanted to know! > > and please refrain from top-posting! > > On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:59:41 -0600 Robert Hamilton <[hidden email]> wrote: > >> A google on NetRexx coding style got over 10K hits. _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
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I am not one to have opinions on posting or coding styles; but for: the current emacs mode for NetRexx reflects the style items I see as important:
- the editor should indent and not you - indenting should be done sparsely (at 2 spaces for class, methods) to save horizontal space - to be able to see more on one line - and to be minimally usable in 72 char punch card/ispf mode - there should be colour/color identification of different token types (it is not as sophisticated as Eclipse mode, though) I must say that I was surprised, when first receiving the source code, at the terseness of the style and specially the lack of spaces around the equals sign (a=b). I think that different words separated by operators deserve a space (even an n-space in proportional fonts). An odd thing with my own sources is that arguments in a method declaration do not get a surrounding space, but receive an underscore so I can clearly see that they are local. I am not against programming in proportional font, by the way, although I seem to set all editors to 14 point Courier (old, not new)). On the other hand I wholeheartedly agree to the principle of no superfluous white space in the vertical sense. Some Java styles have a white line every other line; this is an indication of unreadability in itself. Consequently, I use those to offset a block with a loop or a select visually. After a method body I leave one interline; not so after the method statement itself. best regards, René. On 10 dec. 2012, at 12:44, Chip Davis <[hidden email]> wrote: > Duke, I can understand your pique at receiving an "Is it plugged in?" response to your request for help, but there are several issues at play here: > > 1. You asked a newbie question (justifiably, you admitted being one) but gave no indication that you had done the simplest Google search already. (If Bob had been trying to insult you, he would have sent you to http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=netrexx+coding+style :-) > > A simple "I found 'way too many disparate examples on the Web to tell if there is a preferred style" would have prevented that response. > > 2. You are probably not aware that there is a frequent poster to this list who adamantly refuses to do a Google search before asking questions. He contends that it's easier for him (of course) to let everyone else do the searching and filtering before providing him with an answer. Your failure to mention your own searching inadvertently hit a nerve with many of us. > > 3. When asking for help, it is considered ungracious to complain about the form in which that help appears. > > Despite the absolutists on both sides (and brain-dead MUA's that don't give you the choice) there is no standard or consensus regarding top- or bottom-posting email replies. > > My personal choice is to top-post a simple response. This makes it easy to find the current response when the thread goes on for pages, minimizes the amount of history that must be read, and simplifies trimming the irrelevant tail of the conversation (which far too few > folks do, imho). > > OTOH, a complex posting (which this note is rapidly becoming) such as the discussion of Nested List Support, requires insertion-posting in order that the sub-topics remain coherent. > > The only time that I bottom-post is when forced to do so by an existing bottom-posted thread. I find this most often when dealing with governmental organizations and large corporations, where for legal reasons they need a top-down version of the conversation to print out. > > The only thing worse than a bottom-posted thread is a random-posted thread. I've been know to manually re-arrange the quotes in order to restore linearity. :-) > > Please don't take the above as a personal criticism; it is intended as more of an introduction and explanation. We are glad to have you here. You will find that there are many others (including Bob and myself) who are not NetRexx wizards with all the answers. > > And when you can get a helpful (if bottom-posted ;-) reply from the creator of the language, you should know that you are welcome. > > -Chip- > > On 12/10/2012 09:17 Duke Normandin said: >> >> and when I Googled before asking my question, I concluded that those >> hits were pretty much irrelevant to what I wanted to know! >> >> and please refrain from top-posting! >> >> On Mon, 10 Dec 2012 07:59:41 -0600 Robert Hamilton <[hidden email]> wrote: >> >>> A google on NetRexx coding style got over 10K hits. > > _______________________________________________ > Ibm-netrexx mailing list > [hidden email] > Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ > _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by Duke Normandin
Hi Duke;
Am 10.12.2012 14:45, schrieb Duke Normandin: > The docs that I've read so far are clear that NetRexx allows a lot > of flexibility in how its code gets written. > > However, I would still appreciate any wisdom you long-time NetRexx > hackers might like to pass along as far as coding style goes. Is > there a template on the Web somewhere that might summarize this > wisdom? TIA .... Because I consider documentation as part of coding style (just to understand my own stuff a year later), I'd like to suggest that one can make usage of javadoc and it's keywords in the comment blocks of the NetRexx code. With a little help from ant you'll even get the usual html pages as with java. Using jedit with NetRexx enhancements supported (if not trained) me to get a readable source code (indentation, colors and so on). Note: jedit is just the editor I use, Eclipse and emacs support will be as good or even better. It's a strength of NetRexx that with carefully choosen class, methods, variable, etc naming and no need for special characters (like a the semicolon in perl or curly brackets in java) code almost can be read like a real textbook :) A further issue to consider, is the OO aproach. If a method or class grows too large, I start to think that I did something wrong. The code I'm most satisfied with, fits well into three or better less editor pages - I'm just doing smaller stuff and don't need to make a living with programming, so I'm exaggerating, but you may get the picture. kp _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by rvjansen
> I must say that I was surprised, when first receiving the > source code, at the terseness of the style and specially the > lack of spaces around the equals sign (a=b). Equally, I've never understood why people add 'unnecessary' spaces around operators. There is the 'symbol set' and the 'operator set' of characters, and each delimits the other. And if one adds extra spaces around the operators then that reduces the length of expression one can put in a short space .. and worse, reduces the space for line comments where useful. So I'll tend to use spaces around operators where it helps understanding, as in: foo=a*b + c*d -- this emphasises the precedence of * over + whereas foo=a * b + c * d -- is more "ambiguous" (and wastes 4 characters of comments) and foo = a * b + c * d -- just wastes even more space :-) Mike _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
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I think it is great that this is one of the things that people can decide for themselves. The differcencebetweenoperatorsandsymbols must already be apartofyour reference set tobeclear. In fact, my British friends always complain that when listening to Dutch, the hardest part is to decide where the words stop and start. Germanic languages agglutinate more than Roman. Research indicates that the minds of very small children are mostly occupied with determining these word boundaries when listening, and when growing up multilingually, that is what they will excel at at a later age.
I have no explanation for the reason the lack of whitespace disturbs me in properties declarations, and not in method signatures. Instead, this is disturbing in C, where it is the wrong way around and with a mandatory space: it would fuse the arguments and their types too tight that the compiler must be more intelligent to peel them apart (and of course, here also the argument could be made that at that stage, a compiler must know how to distinguish the types from their variable names). I think in NetRexx the '=' sign correctly binds the variable name closer to its type in the place where it counts and enhances the necessity to be one with their type. I am undecided on whether to have separate lines for method argument variables. I had some projects that did and some that did not. There seems to be a slight maintenance advantage in that, and it creates the possibility to comment on individual arguments, although that is more aptly done in a preceding Javadoc block. But when concatenating them on one line, I do prefer to have a space after a comma; it makes for a proper lexical distinction; even before parsing types: it tells you that another variablename-type pair is coming. best regards, René. On 10 dec. 2012, at 16:49, "Mike Cowlishaw" <[hidden email]> wrote: > >> I must say that I was surprised, when first receiving the >> source code, at the terseness of the style and specially the >> lack of spaces around the equals sign (a=b). > > Equally, I've never understood why people add 'unnecessary' spaces around > operators. There is the 'symbol set' and the 'operator set' of characters, and > each delimits the other. And if one adds extra spaces around the operators then > that reduces the length of expression one can put in a short space .. and worse, > reduces the space for line comments where useful. > > So I'll tend to use spaces around operators where it helps understanding, as in: > > foo=a*b + c*d -- this emphasises the precedence of * over + > > whereas > > foo=a * b + c * d -- is more "ambiguous" (and wastes 4 characters of > comments) > > and > > foo = a * b + c * d -- just wastes even more space :-) > > > Mike > > _______________________________________________ > Ibm-netrexx mailing list > [hidden email] > Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ > _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by Duke Normandin
I have always thought that if NetRexx produces formatted Java code then it could not be to far letting it produce it own formatted nrx file.
Not that anyone had to use it but if would be there to unmangle each person's own style. The same goes for java2nrx. Both should produce similar output. _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by rvjansen
Intelligent syntax coloring will alleviate the problem of separating operators and operands.
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 4:40 PM, René Jansen <[hidden email]> wrote: I think it is great that this is one of the things that people can decide for themselves. The differcencebetweenoperatorsandsymbols must already be apartofyour reference set tobeclear. In fact, my British friends always complain that when listening to Dutch, the hardest part is to decide where the words stop and start. Germanic languages agglutinate more than Roman. Research indicates that the minds of very small children are mostly occupied with determining these word boundaries when listening, and when growing up multilingually, that is what they will excel at at a later age. -- "One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love." -- Leo Tolstoy _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by Jason Martin
An original idea! +1
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:08 PM, Jason Martin <[hidden email]> wrote: I have always thought that if NetRexx produces formatted Java code then it could not be to far letting it produce it own formatted nrx file. -- "One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love." -- Leo Tolstoy _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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Re "original idea," I meant Jason's :).
On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 5:26 PM, George Hovey <[hidden email]> wrote: An original idea! +1 -- "One can live magnificently in this world if one knows how to work and how to love." -- Leo Tolstoy _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
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Those of you who code in Java and use Eclipse are probably familiar
with the extremely powerful formatting capabilities that Java editor
has. It provides just about every conceivable option for inserting
or deleting spaces, new lines, indentation, etc. Once an AST is
established, formatting is simply a question of walking the tree and
inserting and deleting formatting based on a set of rules or
preferences.
I didn't attempt anything like that with the NetRexx plugin because there seem to be so many other higher priority items. I thought Thomas was doing something about NetRexx reformatting? On 12/10/2012 5:41 PM, George Hovey
wrote:
Re "original idea," I meant Jason's :). _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
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In reply to this post by Duke Normandin
Take a look at the redbook here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg242216.pdf
If you want the sample files email me and I'll put them on dropbox. -----Original Message----- From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Duke Normandin Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 7:45 AM To: NetRexx List Subject: [Ibm-netrexx] NetRexx coding style recommendations The docs that I've read so far are clear that NetRexx allows a lot of flexibility in how its code gets written. However, I would still appreciate any wisdom you long-time NetRexx hackers might like to pass along as far as coding style goes. Is there a template on the Web somewhere that might summarize this wisdom? TIA .... -- Duke _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
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These samples are also in the 3.01 distribution.
best regards, René. On 10 dec. 2012, at 19:34, "Measel, Mike" <[hidden email]> wrote: > Take a look at the redbook here: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg242216.pdf > > If you want the sample files email me and I'll put them on dropbox. > > -----Original Message----- > From: [hidden email] [mailto:[hidden email]] On Behalf Of Duke Normandin > Sent: Monday, December 10, 2012 7:45 AM > To: NetRexx List > Subject: [Ibm-netrexx] NetRexx coding style recommendations > > The docs that I've read so far are clear that NetRexx allows a lot of flexibility in how its code gets written. > > However, I would still appreciate any wisdom you long-time NetRexx hackers might like to pass along as far as coding style goes. Is there a template on the Web somewhere that might summarize this wisdom? TIA .... > > -- > Duke > > _______________________________________________ > Ibm-netrexx mailing list > [hidden email] > Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ > > _______________________________________________ > Ibm-netrexx mailing list > [hidden email] > Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ > _______________________________________________ Ibm-netrexx mailing list [hidden email] Online Archive : http://ibm-netrexx.215625.n3.nabble.com/ |
Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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In reply to this post by billfen
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Mike,
I did (intentionally) say "just about every", not "every". :) I agree that is a deficiency, and there others as well, of course. I rather like the idea of converting back and forth between indentation and explicit braces, and would something along those lines. I am genuinely surprised that you know that much about Eclipse! Bill On 12/12/2012 9:19 AM, Mike Cowlishaw
wrote:
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Re: NetRexx coding style recommendations
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I did (intentionally) say "just about every", not
"every". :)
Yeah but that is an 'in your face' omission -- so much so it
seems to be deliberate ...
I agree that is a deficiency, and there others as well, of course. I rather like the idea of converting back and forth between indentation and explicit braces, and would something along those lines. I'd also appreciate it if it would let be do my own formatting
...
I am genuinely surprised that you know that much about Eclipse! Why? .. I was able to avoid it for embedded development
(hence Tollos) but it is really hard to avoid for Android programming
....
Mike
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