Hi Stefan,

> once and forever, I am considering using the "indent" program which comes 
> with every linux installation. Running indent regularly on all our code 
> ensures a consistent look.

I think this can be called a Good Thing.

> The "-kr" style does the standard K&R style, 
> but used tabs (which is not good), and does a 4-column 
> indention which is I think too much. So I would propose 
> following flags:
>        indent -kr -nut -i2 -di8 -bad <filename.c>

(some of this is a repeat from an earlier mail to SR):
You might also want a -l90 for a longer line length than 75
characters.  K&R style with indentation from 5 to 8 spaces
is a good indicator of complexity: as soon as 40 characters
of code wind up unreadably squashed to the right of the
screen, you have to refactor to have less indentation
levels.  This means you wind up rolling up the inner parts
of deeply nested conditionals or loops as separate
functions, making the whole code easier to understand.

I think that setting -i2 is ``going around the problem'' 
of deep nesting.  If you really need to keep the indentation 
tabs less than 4 (8 is ideal) because your code is falling off the 
right edge of the screen, you are indented too deeply.  Why do 
I say that?  There is the famous ``7+-1'' idea that you can hold
in you head only 7 ideas (give or take one) at any time.  I'm not 
that smart and I top out at about 5:  So for example, a conditional 
in a loop  in a conditional in a switch is about as deep a level 
of nesting as  I can easily understand (remember that I also have 
to hold the line i'm working on as well): that's 4 levels, plus one for the
function itself and we are at 40 characters away from the right edge
of the screen using -i8 and have some 40 characters available for writing code
(how often is a line of code really longer than about 40 characters?).
On top of that, the indentation is easily seen so you know immediately 
wheather you are at the upper conditional, or inner conditional.  A -i2
just doesn't make the difference big enough.  -i5 is a happy balance 
with enough visual clue as to the indentation level, but leaves you 50
to 60 characters for the code line itself.

However, if you are indenting very deeply, then the poor reader can't hold
on to the context: there are more than 6 or 7 things to keep in mind.
In those cases, roll up the inner levels as a separate function and 
call it that way. The inner complexity of the nested statements gets 
nicely abstracted and then dumb people like me can understand what 
you are doing.

So, in brief: indent is a good idea, and -in with n>=4 will be best.
I don't think -i2 will lend itself to making the code so much easier 
to read.

thanks for listening.
.p.