Sometimes I arrange my variable declarations so that they make a picture of something in profile... ... don't hate me because I'm beautiful ... :D ---- On a

Sometimes I arrange my variable declarations so that they make a picture of something in profile... ... don't hate me because I'm beautiful ... :D ---- On a more serious note, something I have noticed working on large projects with other programmers, is that if each programmer has their own distinctive style and conventions, then you can tell straight away by looking at it who wrote it, and more importantly who modified it. Thus if Billy (who is an idiot) modified something written by Sheila (who is like unto the goddess of inspired poetry in wisdom and understanding), and the whole is broken, you can pretty much bet that it is Billy's modification that has broken it, and you can spot his bits straight away, this makes debugging a lot easier. I think this is one of the more unfortunate side-effects of things like checkstyle and other forms of overly restrictive style enforcement. The more we sand-paper everybody back to the same (low) level of code appearance, the more information is lost for what I like to call "forensic debugging".