What is the proper way to format code?

Question

When I write code, I try to group lines of similar code together, then leave a blank line and write another block.

I believe this contributes to the neatness and readabi

Answer 1

One of the teachers I had, downgraded one of my assignments because I had spaced my code logically. He said, 'When you have to read code all day in the real world, you won't have this line spacing and you'll be thanking me."

Unless you're seperating blocks with 5 or 10 lines of whitespace (which would drive anyone nuts), you're instructor is just being an ass.

Coding standards are not etched in stone, and they are certainly not the same for all software shops. All companies have different coding standards. For what its worth, some of the coding standards at my company state explicitly "visually seperate logically related blocks of code using a single blank line".

Although we should strive not to write 200-line long methods, its still very common for all of our short methods to contain more than one control flow element, and we should understand that vertical whitespace is just as important as horizontal whitespace in readability. You can satisfy the "single method, single purpose" principle even if you put a blank line between a for-loop and an if-statement in the same method.

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[Edit to add] And just a few more comments:

1) Its very presumptuous that several people in this thread are assuming that the OP is writing 200-line methods, or that there is a necessary correlation between adding blank lines and writing sloppy methods.

2) For what its worth, while the OP's instructor is utterly wrong in assuming that his coding standards are the the same everywhere. However, you should treat the programming course as its own little software shop with its own standards, so your code should be written in a way which follows those standards.

If your instructor is grading you based on how well your code conforms to coding standards, then insist on getting a list of standards. I know if my grade was docked because it didn't conform to standards that the instructor had never given to me (or if his standards say "prefix variables with their datatype"), heads would be rolling.