Re: Thoughts on doxygen for internal documentation

[Theodore Papadopoulo <Theodore dot Papadopoulo at sophia dot inria dot fr>]

law@redhat.com said:
> I'll note that /** is contrary to the GNU coding standards. 

Not really answering in this thread, but this kind of comment make me 
often wonder whether these coding conventions are sometimes reviewed 
and updated. The world is changing around us, the rules should change 
accordingly....

As an example, I always wondered why the rule of 80 columns is still
that strict. IMHO often code can be more readable using longer lines
(still with a reasonnable limit, just an higher one).  Yes I know, some
people still have a very old 80 columns VT100, but those cannot be 
that many ? Indeed, mail reader sometimes have this 80 limit constraints,
but then problems with line wrapping by mailers happen also with 80 
columns... So why keeping this constraints and not updating it to 
something more sensible such as eg 132 colums.

In some sense, this is exactly the same debate as the one of ANSI C 
conversion. Should we keep rules that were certainly very sensible
at the time they were written but that are now obsolete at least for 
99% of the users/developpers.

Not really willing to launch a debate, but just wondering why these 
rules are so rigid...


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Theodore Papadopoulo
Email: Theodore.Papadopoulo@sophia.inria.fr Tel: (33) 04 92 38 76 01
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