On Tue, 3 Sep 2013 11:18:03 +1000
Manu <turkeyman@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I think I've repeated myself 3 or 4 times here, but one more time for
> good measure...
>
> Requiring IDE assistance to make code _readable_ seems completely
> fail to me.
> 1) You're not always reading code in your IDE, often in commit logs,
> diff windows, emails, chat clients.
> 2) With so much hate for IDE support, it seems like a massive
> contradiction to say that an IDE should be required to make code
> readable.
>
> Reading code is the most fundamental task in programming. Anything
> that gets in the way of code readability is an epic fail.
>

First of all, not everybody agrees that separating out function
definitions makes code easier to read rather than harder.

Also, maintainability is just as important as readability, and "poor
maintainability" is a very big and very common objection to C++'s
separation of member function definitions from class definitions. You're
essentially writing and maintaining full documentation completely by
hand and a lot of people feel very bogged down by the extreme
non-DRYness of that very quickly, especially when there are already so
many other ways to get the same information without maintaining
it manually: Automatic Doc generators, high-level IDE class browsing,
and code folding (and code folding is *not* an IDE thing, but an
extremely common code editor thing).