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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

C brace style has nothing to do with readability. Indentation alone shows the block structure just fine; Python proves this.

The purpose of C brace style is to make editing easier in primitive editors that don't do delimiter matching. In such an editor, selecting where, in a long string of closing delimiters, to insert a new element requires counting the delimiters, which is tedious and error-prone. With delimiter matching, the editor does the work for you, so splitting delimiters across lines is completely unnecessary.

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Eh, yes and no. Python at least has `elif` statements.

When execution control depends on the order of nested arguments, I find "c" style to really enhance the following contrived example, even with rainbow parens:

  (if true 
    (whatever this is an (example
       that is (kind of hard)
         (-> to 
           (read %))))
     (this is an ELSE but hard to figure out))

Your example arbitrarily indents and new-lines. If that's what's on the table, then nothing is really going to help you.

    if (x 
    > 100) { console
      .log('hello') } else 
    { console.log
    ('world')}

When it comes to if/else and if you indent with some sanity, then lisp is like Python: if the 'else' branch is too hard to spot or if you forget the context by the time you reach the 'else', then your 'if' branch is simply too many lines long. Or you should flip the condition so that the short branch comes first.

Meanwhile, I can't even write your lisp example as-is in any of the editors I tried it in.

It's hard if you indent wrong.

Also: http://imgur.com/FnXXOXJ

Tell me the above picture is something people have problems understanding the structure of.

Lisp, has cond which is analagous to Python's elif

Also you have your indentation wrong; (this is an ELSE but hard to figur eout) should be one column to the left, which makes it significantly more readable.

Visual Studio's had delimiter matching for years, and will auto-indent based on levels of depth, will add the trailing delimiter, even with adding new elements, etc. C brace style with autoformatting comes in really handy when editing functions on the fly, because it becomes obvious what block you're working on, with no need to look at one parenthesis among many.

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