I was reading through Mike Slinn’s article on InsideRIA called “Good Code is Beautiful” where he is talking about importance of writing code as beautiful as you would expect it to work. Well this reminded me how I transformed from following style of vertically spacing parenthesis to vertically compressed parenthesis style.

From This:

private function foo():void

{

   if(…)

   {

         …

   }

   else

   {

         …

   }

}

To This:

private function foo():void {

   if(…) {

         …

   } else {

         …

   }

}

I agree that vertically spacing parenthesis style is easy to read but again depends on how you look at it and individual taste. But it doesn’t work sometimes.

When I first started to work on Flex 1.5 I faced many problems but one of the particular problem which forced me to switch my liberal way of writing code to writing compressed code (I mean positively). The error is commonly known as “The 32k Error”. The Flex 1.5 compiler seems to consider empty spaces and commented lines while compiling code and sometimes this caused nasty compiler 32k Error. There are many reasons why this error would pop up during compilation and not all are known, however most common are:

1. Number of code lines or file size.
2. Using too many nested looping statements and process heavy data in it (I don’t know why)
3. Or any other reason you might find… (they are not know to me)

Once we encountered this error then it took us days or sometimes weeks to figure out what is causing the error and how to rid it, but over the course of time I learnt that major cause is number of lines in your file so better write a code vertically compressed manner and remove commented or unused code and split large files into many small AS files.

Today I am so used to writing vertically compressed code that I think it is the faster (you save hitting Enter key ) and best way to maintain your code in a long run and its best way to save space (not that you have to pay for space, but you never know).

Cheers,

Satish