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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.
There are three main types of indentation: first-line, hanging and block. Each example below is in a box that represents the page boundary and uses the common typesetting lorem ipsum content. The width of indentation here is in units of em spaces. For first-line indentation the first line of a paragraph is indented. A first-line indentation of ...
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.
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.
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:
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.
In C and C++, keywords and standard library identifiers are mostly lowercase. In the C standard library, abbreviated names are the most common (e.g. isalnum for a function testing whether a character is alphanumeric), while the C++ standard library often uses an underscore as a word separator (e.g. out_of_range).
A snippet of C code which prints "Hello, World!". The syntax of the C programming language is the set of rules governing writing of software in C. It is designed to allow for programs that are extremely terse, have a close relationship with the resulting object code, and yet provide relatively high-level data abstraction.