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Comment by arp242 | Hacker News Reader

Well-formatted code is more than just an AST. Even in Go, a language with probably one of the lowest style divergences out there (for better or worse) there are tons of style choices that aren't in an AST.

Blank lines is an obvious one: where do you insert them to "group" sections of a 30 line function? Or are there no blank lines at all?

Line length: just "wrap at columns X" (or never wrap) is not enough, because people can and do wrap at specific locations for specific reasons, because that makes more semantic sense or looks nicer than cramming as much as possible.

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I prefer no blank lines. If you feel like you need one, write a line comment instead describing the next section.

Well okay, but a great many people disagree and this sort of thing isn't captured in an AST, so clearly it's not a suitable format for storing code.

I think that's a terrible choice. Its like saying "I don't like whitespace in webpage design. If they need whitespace, fill it with content - like maybe some text."

Whitespace gives readers subtle information about the structure of a function before they read any of it. Its a powerful tool. Dismissing or - worse - deleting whitespace wholesale sounds profoundly misguided to me.

Why make code harder to read? Where's the benefit to your approach? I can't see any.

Whitespace is useful in normal prose because it has no inherent visual structure aside from punctuation. A programing language is inherently structured into logical functions and blocks. If your function is so complex that you need to start adding whitespace to make it visually parseable then that's its own problem.

Let’s look at a real example. Here’s the source code for binary search from rust’s standard library:

https://doc.rust-lang.org/src/core/slice/mod.rs.html#2786-28...

The function is pretty short - 40 lines including comments. Despite how short the function is, it still uses whitespace to separate and group adjacent lines of code. Personally, I find the code more readable like this. Indentation makes syntactic blocks obvious (the while loop and if statement). But there are also conceptual groupings between lines that mean nothing to the compiler, but are semantically meaningful to humans. I can tell at a glance that the comment about safety is most associated with that one line below the comment. And so on.

I think this code would be worse if we deleted the whitespace. How would you improve this code?

All of the blank lines can be deleted from that function without reducing the readability.

Maybe for you. But it would reduce the readability for me.

At a minimum, the blank lines implicitly scope the comments that sit above connected code blocks. Those comments - especially the comment about safety - would be harder to understand and audit without its context being so clear.

And again, can you name any benefit to removing all the blank lines? If we can both read the code easily with some empty lines to space it out, that seems like the best option.

I mean the whole Go stdlib barely use them right?

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