• @[email protected]
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    131 year ago

    As an embedded software developer that does linux kernel drivers I’ve come to love the tab size 8 indentation level.

    I’m paraphrasing: “if your indentation level gets too deep, it’s time to rethink/refactor your function.”

    And with tab 8 you’ll notice it rather quick if your function does too much/unrelated stuff.

    A function should be short and do one thing only, if possible. It also makes unit testing easier if that’s a requirement.

    • xigoi
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      -11 year ago

      When you’re operating on such a low level of abstraction, it’s no wonder you don’t need deep nesting.

      • @[email protected]
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        11 year ago

        Oh, I’ve done my fair share of C++ and Python as well. But you got to agree with me that when you are on your fourth indented “if case” it’s time to step back and think about what you are trying to achieve. I mean it’s probably going to work, but probably also very hard to maintain that type of code.

        • xigoi
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          21 year ago

          How would you implement, for example, Gaussian elimination with at most 3 levels of nesting?

            • xigoi
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              1 year ago

              Be specific. Which exact part would you abstract away and how?

              • @[email protected]
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                1 year ago

                There a many ways to implement abstractions, but it’s highly dependent on the language in question. You could simply refactor each level of nesting into its own function, with all dependents provided as parameters instead of scoped variables. You could then flatMap to avoid a bunch of nested looping, favoring a linear approach that’s often easier to reason about. You could go all out and refactor all your conditional statements away, in favor of the Either monad. You’d then have a number of functions, each doing one thing (including no nesting), and a main function gluing it all together, linearly. That is a pattern you can always apply; there’s nothing controversial about it, and on a similar note there’s nothing particularly challenging about Gaussian elimination.