Re: [boost] clang-format file

On 22. Jan 2018, at 21:00, Michael Caisse via Boost wrote:

*Please* do not mess up the source code. Some of us believe that there is an art involved to writing beautiful code. The white space formatting of heavy template code, macros, and EDSL's makes the code understandable to humans.

Clang-format and other such tools destroy readability and understanding in many code bases. Don't believe me? Take a look at well written Proto, Spirit, MSM, or MPL/Fusion heavy sources written by someone who believes that code should be beautiful. Now run it through your favorite format-tool and observe the horrible mess that emerges.

While I agree in general, there are also ways to have both. In our little project, we decided to have a consistent and automated style, enforced by clang-format. But there are sections of code which are hand-formatted, you can simply augment them with comments to turn clang-format off and later on again. As an example, see https://github.com/taocpp/PEGTL/blob/master/src/example/pegtl/unescape.cpp. Nevertheless, reformatting all of Boost seems like a terrible idea right now. It might be an option for those libraries/maintainers that want to use a consistent style in the future and stop debating over it, still having the possibility to exclude some sections from auto-formatting. Regardless, someone has to come up with an agreeable style first anyways... Daniel