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The off-side rule describes syntax of a computer programming language that defines the bounds of a code block via indentation. [1] [2]The term was coined by Peter Landin, possibly as a pun on the offside law in association football.
In computer programming, indentation style is a convention, a.k.a. style, governing the indentation of blocks of source code.An indentation style generally involves consistent width of whitespace (indentation size) before each line of a block, so that the lines of code appear to be related, and dictates whether to use space or tab characters for the indentation whitespace.
Proper code formatting makes it easier to read and understand. Different programmers often prefer different styles of formatting, such as the use of code indentation and whitespace or positioning of braces. A code formatter or code indenter converts source code from one format style to another. This is relatively straightforward because of the ...
The rules a compiler applies to the source creates implicit standards. For example, Python code is much more consistently indented than, say Perl, because whitespace (indentation) is actually significant to the interpreter. Python does not use the brace syntax Perl uses to delimit functions. Changes in indentation serve as the delimiters.
Indentation style can assist a reader in various way including: identifying control flow and blocks of code. In some programming languages, indentation is used to delimit blocks of code and therefore is not matter of style. In languages that ignore whitespace, indentation can affect readability. For example, formatted in a commonly-used style:
PyCharm – Cross-platform Python IDE with code inspections available for analyzing code on-the-fly in the editor and bulk analysis of the whole project. PyDev – Eclipse-based Python IDE with code analysis available on-the-fly in the editor or at save time. Pylint – Static code analyzer. Quite stringent; includes many stylistic warnings as ...
An example of Python code and indentation Example of C# code with curly braces and semicolons. Python is meant to be an easily readable language. Its formatting is visually uncluttered and often uses English keywords where other languages use punctuation.
Fortran 90 removed the need for the indentation rule and added line comments, using the ! character as the comment delimiter. COBOL. In fixed format code, line indentation is significant. Columns 1–6 and columns from 73 onwards are ignored. If a * or / is in column 7, then that line is a comment.