Code Advice #10: Place brackets with the declaration type, not the name

(See intro for a background and caveats on these coding advice blog entries.) The most important code style rule is that when you modify somebody else's code, you preserve the coding style in that file. Even when it hurts. The only thing worse than an "incorrectly" styled source file is an inconsistently styled one! One of my coworkers writes Java code in a very C-inspired way. One of the habits I have difficulty with is the bracket placement for arrays. I thought I would dedicate a blog entry to this, because it occurs in many other code bases. A quick scan revealed a couple thousand matches in the JDK source code (which, granted, is a tiny fraction of the overall codebase). Briefly stated, the correct way (as far as I'm concerned) to place brackets in an array declaration is with the type, not with the variable name. Therefore, this is okay: int[] scores; and this is not: int scores[]; Here's a real-world example, from String.java: @Deprecated public String(byte ascii[], int hibyte, int offset, int count) { checkBounds(ascii, offset, count); char value[] = new char[count]; ... As you can see, there are two violations here - both in the parameter usage, and in the declaration of local variable "value". Most of you will probably just nod at this and move on, since it's what you're already doing. But if ...

Date: July, 17 2006
Url: http://blogs.sun.com/tor/entry/code_advice_10_place_brackets

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