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A whitespace character is a character data element that represents white space when text is rendered for display by a computer. For example, a space character (U+0020 SPACE, ASCII 32) represents blank space such as a word divider in a Western script. A printable character results in output when rendered, but a whitespace character does not ...
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.
In computer programming, indentation describes formatting source code with whitespace to the left of code text – often to visually show that a sequence of code lines is syntactically a code block. Typically, the lines of a block are aligned with an amount of white space that indicates the block's depth in the hierarchical structure of the code.
A free-format language ignores whitespace characters: spaces, tabs and new lines so the programmer is free to style the code in different ways without affecting the meaning of the code. Generally, the programmer uses style that is considered to enhance readability. The two code snippets below are the same logically, but differ in whitespace.
Many trim functions have an optional parameter to specify a list of characters to trim, instead of the default whitespace characters. For example, PHP and Python allow this optional parameter, while Pascal and Java do not. With Common Lisp's string-trim function, the parameter (called character-bag) is required.
As in curly bracket languages, whitespace is mostly ignored by the reader (i.e., the read function). Whitespace is used to separate tokens. [5] The explicit structure of Lisp code allows automatic indenting, to form a visual cue for human readers. Another alternative is for each block to begin and end with explicit keywords.
These unnecessary characters usually include white space characters, new line characters, comments, and sometimes block delimiters, which are used to add readability to the code but are not required for it to execute. Minification reduces the size of the source code, making its transmission over a network (e.g. the Internet) more efficient.
Reducing the cost of software maintenance is the most often cited reason for following coding conventions. In the introductory section on code conventions for the Java programming language, Sun Microsystems offers the following reasoning: [2]