[web_chops]

That is what surprised me a lot. That there would be so much defense of the practice. I work on C/C++ for a living in enterprise environment and there are style rules followed diligently. Every one knows that there can be lot of cool/hipster code written with C/C++ but no one does because of the maintenance concerns. Writing code is much easier than maintaining it.

[chad_walters]

What are the universally accepted style rules for C/C++? Every organization I have worked in has had to develop their own guidelines around style in C/C++.

What really surprises me is that such a large number of people are quick to attack someone for writing legal code simply because they disagree with the style used. It feels awfully close to attacking someone for using a different bracing style from your preferred bracing style.

[regularfry]

> What are the universally accepted style rules for C/C++?

Whenever I've been asked this, I've pointed people at the JSF-AV coding standards or MISRA.

> What really surprises me is that such a large number of people are quick to attack someone for writing legal code simply because they disagree with the style used.

The important part of the lifecycle of a piece of code isn't the writing of it. It's the maintaining and rewriting that matters. If one coding style makes it easier to introduce errors than an alternative, that's a bad thing. It's not an aesthetic concern. Semicolon-less JS is demonstrably less robust.

[jcoffey]

The feature in question is intended as an error correction for those cases where the programmer accidentally left out newline. A misguided feature maybe, but it's clearly being abused by intentionally leaving out every (or most) newlines.