Re: pgindent versus struct members and typedefs

On Dec 3, 2025, at 07:13, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:

Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com> writes:

On Dec 3, 2025, at 06:51, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
In this case, I think pgindent is indirectly enforcing good style.
I do not like omitting braces around anything that's more than one
line; readers have to pay close attention to whether the code is
doing what it was intended to.

For “one line”, do you mean only a single line of statement or one line statement plus one line comment?

In my head, a comment and a statement are two lines, and so need
wrapping braces as much as two statements would do.  I realize that
C compilers think differently, but for readability and modifiability
reasons that's the approach I take.

Totally agreed. In my first job at Lucent Technologies, the coding standard was that braces should always be added even if a clause has only one line of code. I remember one of the explanations was like, if braces has been added, then later when a new line of code is added to the clause, there is only one line of diff, otherwise braces need to be added, so it would be 3 lines of diffs.

+1. One of the things I find particularly un-aesthetic is having some branches of an if statement with braces and some without. We have lots of cases of that, but I try to avoid it.

cheers

andrew

--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com