[mercury-users] Re: Preferred coding style for switches

[Fergus Henderson]

On 10-Dec-1999, Gustavo A. Ospina <gos at info.fundp.ac.be> wrote:
> 
> In my Mercury coding style, I prefer write the switches as:
> 
> p(X) :-
> (	X = foo1,
> 	...
> ;
> ...
> ;
> 	X = fooN,
> 	...
> ).
> 
> In this way I save one identation level, too. Of course, it's not the last
> word.

I think the use of 8-character tabs for indentation is probably
not a good idea.  It makes sense in Prolog, where you tend to
have little indentation, because Prolog forces you to use
a separate predicate for every switch (since in general you only
get indexing on the top-level functor of the first argument).
But for Mercury I think using four spaces per level of indentation
would be a better idea.

(For the compiler itself, we use 8-character tabs, but
that's partly for historical reasons; changing now would
be quite costly.  So this is a "do as I say, not as I do"
kind of advice ;-)

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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