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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

>>Who does that?

You mean the indentation style? The K&R vs ANSI/Allman thing?

That argument started well before java, and continues. I would guess you're seeing it there because whoever wrote it had previously been a C++ developer. Inertia. GNU's classpath, for example, is indented this way...same thing, inertia. Easy enough to batch reformat though.

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I was referring to putting visibility modifier in its own line.

It's handy if you're looking for the methods definition using a regex. Instead of doing something like (in pseudo-regex):

    $[public|private|whatever-else-can-behere](FUNCTION_YOURE_LOOKING_FOR)

you can do a slightly simpler

    $(FUNCTION_YOURE_LOOKING_FOR)

Obviously your code editor/IDE should handle that, but maybe if you wanted to whip up a quick script to something a little odd, it'd be quite handy to have the function name on a separate line.

Well, that's the first time I see such convention. And your argument doesn't quite hold water to me. They put the visibility modifier in its own line, not the function name. It's still next to the return type (or void). So it would still beat your regex. Plus, I'm not exactly sure if any Android devs snap out little regex-based scripts for refactoring or whatnot :) I'm sure it's far from unusual in dynamic languages, but looks like a great YAGNI in this case. I'm not hating it, all I'm saying is it's odd :)

You're completely right, it's odd. Also I didn't realise that the return type was also on the same line as the function name, in which case, even more odd.

I think the idea dates back to early C. I've definitely seen C code with the return type on a separate line.

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