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@sicp @p "K&R style (along with the old C syntax) I figure makes the most sense if you consider writing stuff line-by-line on a teletype with ed; it keeps the lines short."

And there we have it! :cirnoSmile:

Ed was my first editor (not counting the punch card game), and some of it was on a DECwriter, plus I used a real Teletype for international communications a while later.

There were extreme penalties in both time to do a mechanical line feed (and carriage return to a degree) and paper use if you'd for example written "} else {" in three lines. K&R and crew just wouldn't have done that, in the same way they found the CR-LF?CR-LF an entirely acceptable single error message in ed.

Of Bell Labs code I've only read the V6 kernel examples in the Lions' Notes, it was pretty nice although maybe Lions touched it up, or ran it through a pretty printer, I think there was one by the time of V6.

"When I look at Bell Labs code I usually get the idea that whoever was writing it cared more about just getting the program out than getting it to look nice."

There was a lot of work needed to make UNIX™ usable for normies writing technical documentation, I can entirely believe a "get it done" attitude without worrying so much about code formatting elegance in the process.

Especially outside of the kernel where you had it to catch so many mistakes semi-elegantly.